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Banking, finance, and taxes

AT&T Mobile Banking Not Good From Credit Cards

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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AT&T (T) is launching a program that allows users of its Cingular wireless service to pay bills online. Wachovia (WB) will be the major banking partner. According to Reuters, the deal is a "step toward the long-promised notion of phones replacing credit cards, checks and cash." If that notion is true, it may not be good news for some credit card companies.

Certainly Citigroup (C) with its vast credit card operations could be hurt by a move to mobile payment systems. So could Mastercard (MA) and American Express (AXP).  Mastercard has done unusually well since its IPO, rising from under $43 to over $108 in less than a year. That may make its shares particularly vulnerable.

The question of whether Americans will use phones to pay bills is still an open one. In Asia, the practice is wide-spread. If that occurs in this market, some of the traditional payment systems will take a hit.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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