No abstract

Mobile enabled payment technologies have seen an upsurge with advancement in smartphone technology. Several companies, including Google, Paypal, Amazon, Facebook have launched mobile payment solutions. Easy to adopt user interfaces play a pivotal role in wider adoption of such solutions. Typically, existing mobile payment solutions are designed for the user to type in the details of a transaction, like recipient id, amount, authorization code. Use of a pictorial mode to capture the transaction information can make the user interaction easier and faster during a transaction. We use a popular pictorial encoding format, called Quick-Response (QR) code, to auto-fill necessary details during a transaction, thus relieving the user from typing in the details. In this study using 48 participants from different literacy levels, we have compared the use of standard typing based system against inputs using pictorial format for enabling mobile payments. Our study indicates the benefits of QR code in designing UIs for mobile payment applications.

Advancement in mobile technology, coupled with a market wide growth in mobile subscriber base, is encouraging financial, telecom and even third party operators to offer mobile payment services. In presence of a plethora of such services, an imminent problem is lack of interoperability across them. In this work, we address the challenge of interoperability by designing a wallet service built upon a concept of token. A token encapsulates a payment instruction, which can be of different types, such as instant, dated or installment payment. A token is represented by a Info-Matrix code, viz. Quick-Response (QR) code, thereby bringing in additional advantages in terms of user interactions with the wallet service. We present the lifecycle management of a token, beginning with token generation on user request, transfer of token, and acknowledged receipt and encashment of a token. This work presents an architecture for interoperable wallet service, along with the implementation of a system that demonstrates the use of QR-codes as standardized tokens for transactions.