There’s two schools of thought when it comes to mobile payments, or the ability to use your mobile phone to pay for goods and services.

The first is a little similar to the one about if God had intended us to fly, she’d have given us wings. In other words, we don’t use our mobile to make payments now, so why on earth would we in the future?

Others (and this is the group I lean towards) think that it’s pretty inevitable and it’s not a question of “if” but “when”. And who will win, of course. I write this with the BIG proviso that the payment methodology must be as simple or easier to use than paying by credit card. All too often hopefuls enter the market and ignore this basic point and make their systems ridiculously cumbersome for payer and payee.

Here’s a longer piece on mobile payments I wrote a few months ago, in case you missed it.

So it’s fascinating to read Business Week’s (via Emergic) look at payments in Korea, an obviously more advanced and sophisticated mobile market.

About half of Koreans use one of the 5 mobile payment competitors’ services, charging up $1 billion a year (up from $290 million in 2002). This is also in the context that merchant charges are about 8.5%, as opposed to a more typical 3.5%, so it really looks like it’s driven by user demand than merchant push.

Most sales seem to be online, as opposed to the real world, and the process involves inputting your mobile, National ID number and then a confirmation code that subsequenty arrives by sms. It’s marginally more cumbersome than using a credit card, it seems, so there must be a genuine user need to use their mobile like this.

Of course, just because something works in Korea, doesn’t follow that it will work in other parts of the world, notably Europe and the US. But in my view, it’s a pretty good bet that it will.