Your Cell Phone as a Wallet

By: Li Bin Chen

Upstart Paymo, with the help of wireless carriers, aims to help U.S. consumers make mobile payments

In many countries, the cell phone has become the new wallet. Forget cash, checks or plastic: In places like Japan and Finland, consumers can pay for train rides or even merchandise with a wave of their phones or via text message.

Then there's the U.S. The mobile phone has yet to become a tool for payments here, largely because the different players in the mobile payment ecosystem ­--wireless operators, banks, credit card companies and software providers ­ -- have tended to squabble over how to divide the fees from such transactions.

Now one promising upstart thinks it has cracked the code. Paymo, a two-year-old mobile payment network, says it has forged deals with four U.S. carriers ­ AT&T, T-Mobile, Cellular One and Virgin Mobile -- that will allow users to buy digital goods online and pay with their mobile phone.

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