AT&T is planning to launch a mobile payments service later this year, Spencer White, director of mobile financial services and business development, told the Mobile Payments World seminar at CTIA. It’s keen to open a “single front door” format for mobile banking and payments with one user interface providing access to a number of different internet service providers, similar to the way it does e-mail and IM reports RCR News. Like most big entities, banks are unlikely to want their brand put up beside those of its competitors—but they should realise that almost no-one is going to choose a bank based on whether they can access the service on AT&T Wireless, the point is to offer additional functionality to existing customers. AT&T seems to be working both on near-field wireless payments and over-the-network solutions.

It has held a few trials, and for one that put a Java application on some peoples handsets for mobile banking it took less than a month before it got reports of lost phones that needed to have financial information wiped from a distance. “Data from a mobile banking trial with BancorpSouth bank, mobile payments enabler Firethorn Holdings L.L.C. and e-commerce company CheckFree Corp. revealed that once introduced to mobile payments, 84 percent of users recognized their value and 74 percent felt that the application helped them make better financial choices, White said. The number of banking log-ins increased 36 percent, he added, and about a quarter of participants used the service to pay bills.”

One interesting point is that White said AT&T doesn’t want to offer mobile payments for goods that will go onto the mobile phone bill. “Our customers are price-sensitive, and we have to compete in a very fierce market to keep costs as low as possible…We think there is significant risk in sticker shock,” he said. He’s got a point—it would only be a matter of time before stories came out about people buying whitegoods and getting surprised by bills of more than $1,000.