. >> our final witness is miss suzanne martindale. >> thank you very much for the opportunity to testify today on behalf of consumers union. the advocacy policy arm of consumer reports. mobile payments allow consumers to buy products or transfer money with a mobile device. the market includes a range of different technologies and many ways to fund the transactions. it's unclear which trends will prevail. it's too soon to know which consumers would benefit most or be at most risk. mobile payments market is in a word complex. there are multiple ways to initiate payments. some services involve sending a text message or using an application downloaded to the device. others employ a chip imbedded in the hardware. multiple parties are involved. consumers, merchants, third-party processors, wireless carriers all in the same system. with so many players involved the risk of confusion for consumers increase is if something goes wrong. if all the parties point the finger at each other, the consumer may be out of luck. somemer can'ts are interested in the technology because mobile payment service p

martindale. what is the bench and how does it work? i think you mentioned in your opening statement because that's an important group of my constituents. >> i think the way you can set it up now so don't even need a bank account to do these type of transactions is you could have a prepaid debit card, right, which is not a bank account, and you could link your mobile payment application to that prepaid card so you are drawing down funds from repeat -- prepaid deposit but this is way that unbank or underbank consumers could. >> so you have to set something of? >> you would have to set something up. again, we have a whole host of other concerns about prepaid cards just and it will because they are as of yet not regulate in the same way that he debit card link to a bank or credit card union account part is. so prepaid card itself doesn't inadequate protections against fraud, so if you're at it and asked a layer of the mobile payment transactions and each of prepaid card, we do have a concern that this could, this has a great, this is a gre