My Phone is a Credit Card?

Remember I tweeted about this One.Tap technology some time ago by DBS? I was doing some ibanking and I saw the banner ad. (Yes I do pay attention to side ads and what-have-yous on websites.) I went to SHAW yesterday for a movie and I saw the NFC reader and realized that OMG you can now really actually pay with your phone!!!!!!!!

This is a big deal for me because I always forget to bring my so many so many cards. Like I would remember these 2 cards but forget the other 2. Or forget to bring the wallet (but somehow never forgets to bring the phone). I thought it's a really wonderful technology (the future is now...?) that I kinda wanna share with all you guys. You know, in case your friend brings it up during conversation and you're lost and seems so outdated, or so you can know all about it and show off to your friends that you know about this. #kiasu

Basically this One.Tap thing makes use of NFC (Near field communication) technology which is a short-range wireless technology that transmits data between your phone and a reader. And the amazing part is that the credit card is kind of integrated into your NFC SIM card, so all you got to do is tap the back of your NFC-enabled phone to the reader at the cashier. Voila! Payment is made!!!!
Oh, you can save all your loyalty cards into the phone too, so YES TO NOT HAVING TO BRING ANOTHER CARD HOLDER FOR ALL YOUR LOYALTY CARDS!!!!!!!

O.O

Whoooooaaaa~~~~~

NFC-enabled phone means? Haha!!! I own one!!!!! For now, it is any one of these phone models:
Samsung S3
Sony Experia S
Sony Experia Sola

But then again I'm sure more phones will be NFC-enabled. How long the wait will be is a mystery though. (So make the switch now~~~ now I have one more reason to love my S3...hehe~)

To cut my long story short, this is the video that I saw on the DBS site some months ago:



Amazing or what?

So I went and read up more about it, and found that it's a collaboration between DBS, MasterCard, Starhub, and EzLink. Which means Hooray! for *Starhub users! If you own an NFC-enabled phone,  apply for a DBS One.Tap credit card via banking/mobile banking, head down to Starhub to change your SIM/MicroSIM to an NFC SIM card, download the Starhub SmartWallet from Google Play, download One.Tap, and once your account is activated, you can start paying with the phone!

Imagine everyone tapping their wallets at the MRT gantries, then you smugly walk ahead and tap your phone. Lol~ Cool or what???
(Just make sure your phone battery is not dead, and bring an external charger.)

*Singtel and M1 customers, I heard this service will be available soon.

Where can you use this? Apparently there are more than 30,000 merchant points in Singapore, including Watson's, SHAW & Comfort Cab. This is the future, I mean come on!!! How cool is that??? So I'm pretty sure more merchants will start using this and one day we can FINALLY stop bringing all those cards out.

Waddya think? =D I say yay! 

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