Judging from all the announcements over the last few months, you’d have to say “yes” – but is it all plain sailing? Lately we’ve seen Isis announcing its first NFC pilot cities and at about the same time, Sprint also announced plans for NFC services before the end of 2011.
As featured in the UK’s Independent newspaper this morning, NFC is causing a lot of excitement about its potential, with 2011 and 2012 expected to see important service launches. At Juniper we’re forecasting that some 300 million smartphones will be NFC capable by 2014 worldwide – that’s around 1 in 5 smartphones.
However for NFC the challenge continues to be arriving at the correct business model for each service.
Linking back to the Sprint and Isis report on Bloomberg, I noticed two approaches. Isis is taking a percentage of each transaction – which is probably the most common approach – whereas Sprint is looking to derive revenues from “coupons and targeted advertising.” Often the retail marketing element has less limelight than the payments functionality but actually when we modelled the options, the retail opportunity has great potential too.
Tags: mobile payments, NFC
As I’m invoved in Near Field Communication this articles and your reports are of great interest to me. The has been an unbelievable ammount of interest from all sectors, especially the use of NFC in security systems and medical care. Its’s not just contactless payments NFC will embrace all industries and change the way we conduct commerce.