Just when you thought you had heard the biggest mobile payment news, Honda goes and does one up. In a new bold move, Honda Automobiles in partnership with Visa, has announced plans to turn their cars into mobile wallets that can be used to pay for petrol and parking, much like your ATM card. This would definitely be a welcome development right now in Lagos, maybe it could help with the long queues?
In a demonstration made at the 2016 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the company showed off a model app that would let drivers pay for fuel and parking right from the comfort of their cars. This app which can be accessed through the car’s dashboard, will alert the driver when they are running low on fuel and further direct them to the nearest petrol station to fill up. As soon as the car pulls up next to the pump, this app then calculates the cost of filling up the tank and lets the driver pay from the app and even purchase items from the convenience store at the station.
According to research firm, Gartner, there will be an estimated quarter of a billion connected vehicles on the road by 2020, which means people will in turn be handling a lot of transactions on their car’s dashboards.
Jim McCarthy, executive vice president of innovation and strategic partnerships for Visa in a news releasesaid, “the notion of transforming a car into a platform for payments is not as far off as some may think, and we have made a great deal of progress since first introducing the idea one year ago.” He further said, “Working with Honda to test these prototypes gets us another step closer toward commercial reality, which we think provides exciting opportunities to everyone who plays a role in the payments and automotive ecosystems.”
2015 in Nigeria saw the launch of different payment platforms like the PayAttitude and the PayWithCapture, both of which are challenging users to pay in different interesting ways. This Honda/Visa innovation would surely be welcome in offering users even more payment options.
Nigeria will obviously still have to wait awhile for this service to become available here as the company says they will be testing the fuel app concept in northern California and the parking app concept in New York City, both over a three-month period, starting this Spring.
Who knows though? Maybe local manufacturers like Innoson Motors can take the inspiration to launch something equally as daring. Zoto, the innovative new mobile payment company in Nigeria has already started releasing innovative services that offer users the options to handle online transactions more conveniently.
