Just returned home to San Francisco from a rather mindbending week in Singapore, in and around the Mobile Payments World 2008 conference. I’ve thought for some years that Asia-Pacific is the most innovative region on the planet for consumer payment services, and recent developments, as revealed at this event at which leading banks, telcos and vendors from all over the continent were represented, reinforce that.

One of the highlights was seeing a demo of Sony’s FeliCa contactless payment system, which is operational today in Japan. By laying your FeliCa- enabled cell phone or IC card on a reader, you can: buy a box of chocolates, redeeming a discount coupon in the process; get cash from an ATM; check in for – and board – a flight; enter and exit the subway (if you’re a kid, your mom immediately gets an SMS telling her where in the subway system you are); and … here comes the cool part … pay for online purchases in card-present mode with a reader attached to the PC. External readers are connected via USB or, in the case of all Sony Vaio laptops now sold in Japan, fully integrated into the machine. Oh, and because it would be too boring to limit applications to just payments, you can use the self same card as a key to enter and exit your house. Security seems to have been well thought through: encryption keys are dynamically generated and employed each time a transaction is initiated, and biometric authentication is optionally available.

The guy from Sony who showed me the demo told me that when he’s at home in Japan, he doesn’t carry a wallet arround any more: he can do everything he needs to do with his mobile. This is stuff we can only dream of today in the US.

Now of course these products may not translate exactly to the US market.There are significant regulatory, infrastructure, and cultural differences between America and Japan. But the FeliCA system gives you a distinct sense of what is possible, and is a reminder that we in the US payments industry should pay more attention to what goes on overseas – especially in the Asia-Pacific where they’ve actually done things that we just talk about Stateside, and have been doing for a good while.