An innovative but low-cost e-payment mechanism and its extension to E-ticketing and E-identity document applications

Despite the advent of e-payment decades ago, the cashless society is still a prediction of pundits, in particular, in the retail or business-to-customer sector. No doubt, there are countless financial, political, economic, and social considerations as to the possibility of e-payment's utilization to a larger extent than has occurred so far, but it is undeniable that there may still be ample room for technical improvement to virtually all existing e-payment mechanisms for catalyzing further popularization. Based on the literature on crucial factors determining particular e-payment mechanisms achieving critical mass, this article, given its applied and industrial rather than theoretical nature, summarizes the weaknesses of major existing e-payment mechanisms, deduces the key technical dilemmas underlying such weaknesses, and finally proposes an innovative but low-cost e-payment mechanism (now a patent pending of the author) to surmount such dilemmas by means of the enhancement and generalization of existing mobile phone tickets or otherwise. In particular, overcoming such dilemmas involves the provision of highly secure authentication and non-repudiation that are implementable over public communication transmission media and/or networks at no expense of payment success rates, operational ease and efficiency, hardware and software independence, and interoperability and portability. This article also illustrates the way to extend the proposed mechanism to such applications as e-ticketing and e-identity documents.