02/18/2010
Telephony Online
Near-field communications, and mobile banking in general, get so much support from a wide swatch of players, but is support enough? Not yet. Without NFC-enabled mobile phones, it’s a market that will never see its potential realized. But we are getting closer.
At Mobile World Congress this week the GSM Association launched what they’re billing as the first SIM-based NFC payment trial to drive NFC adoption and promised that phones would soon follow. The GSMA-hosted trial included handset maker Samsung, wireless operator Telefónica and financial companies Visa, G&D, Ingenico, ITN International and La Caixa. The companies loaded 400 Samsung Star NFC mobile phones with Telefónica SIM cards from O2 and Visa’s mobile payment application and gave them to MWC attendees to purchase goods totaling up to €75 from 30 locations within the conference.
The GSMA’s trial complements its Pay-Buy-Mobile initiative, which has the support of more than 50 mobile operators all working to bring NFC to market. Nokia also began utilizing its Obopay acquisition with the first commercial pilot of its Nokia Money Service in India this week. All demonstrations of the power of NFC are positive in that they raise awareness. They might make consumers want to adopt NFC too, but they won’t be able to until more handsets are launched commercially.
It’s not for lack of want that NFC handsets have yet to come to market. Michael O’Hara, the GSMA’s chief marketing officer, admitted that mobile operators have been requesting SIM-based NFC handsets for some time now. In a press release, he said that NFC handsets are coming, along with commercial launches. But, we’ve yet to see these handsets at MWC. In the slew of launched devices, only Samsung and small vendor Sagem’s handset aimed at older users included NFC capabilities.
Concurrent with the show, ABI Research put out two studies showing the power of mobile financial services. The first indicated that in 2015 around 244 million people worldwide, and 66 million in North America, will use their phone for financial transactions with their banks. The second study released this week shows that shoppers around the world will spend about $119 billion on goods and services purchased via mobile phones, representing 8% of the total e-commerce market.
The growth in mobile financial services in general is impressive. But NFC is the end-game of a long evolution of these services. NFC has the power to change how consumer transact with their phones, how they make payments, use tickets and transfer money. It’s great the NFC is attracting so much interest from across various ecosystem, but now it is time to bring on the phones.
Not too many hands, are there Software engineers are in big demand in the U.S., and this trend will surely continue. Internet Banking