iD Cashing (iDキャッシング)

» see id-credit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

NTT docomo announced iD on 8 November 2005 and started it as a postpay service on 1 December that year. It ran on FeliCa, the contactless chip Sony developed, which in Japan meant it ran inside the phone: Osaifu-Keitai, the wallet handset. The platform worked. It passed five million members in November 2007, ten million in December 2008, fifteen million by the end of August 2010, and was over sixteen and a half million by March 2012.

iD Cashing opened on 27 March 2006, four months after the platform it sat on. It was a cash advance, taken at a machine, with the authorization done by holding your handset against the reader-writer panel. The machines were @BANK units, the network installed in FamilyMart stores that had inherited the am/pm chain, available everywhere except Kyushu. If your card issuer was one of the Sumitomo Mitsui partners, or one of docomo's own except DCMX mini, you were eligible.

It ended on 15 December 2013, seven years and eight months in. No reason was published. The platform underneath carried on and added prepaid in April 2016 and debit in July 2017, and iD is still a working payment service today, which is the cleanest way to see what this was: a feature, not a product, removed from a thing that kept going.

~ the dossier ~

~ the rule about cards ~

The restriction is the detail I keep coming back to. A credit card with the iD function physically embedded in it was barred from iD Cashing. To use it you needed an Osaifu-Keitai handset. Normally the card is the real instrument and the phone is the convenient copy of it. Here the copy had a power the original did not. The article does not explain why, and the plain mechanical difference is that a handset could run an application and ask you for a PIN, while a piece of plastic could only present an identity.

~ what a 2006 phone was carrying ~

In March 2006 I was at university in Ankara, with TTNet broadband arriving at the house around then and a phone that could send a text and take a terrible photograph. Nothing inside it was interesting to a bank. Japanese handsets of that same year had a secure element in them that convenience-store cash machines were already built to talk to, and a national payment brand with millions of members behind it. Paying for things by tapping a phone reached me as a normal thing years after this particular service had already been switched off.

~ the overseas half ~

There was a second dead branch on the same platform. iD launched abroad in 2014 as iD/PayPass, riding Mastercard's contactless network, was renamed iD/NFC in 2015, and ended in 2018. The Japanese article gives that last one as a bare year with no month attached, so it is dated worse than the domestic service that died five years earlier.

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