Wences Casares says NFC mobile payments work fine as a user experience, but the real barrier is infrastructure: linking phones to accounts and getting merchants to upgrade their payment terminals. Building that costs so much money that big companies will dominate, leaving only niche gaps for startups.
Chapters
The question is, with all the buzz around nfc, near field communication, what will be the tipping point for consumers to adopt it? I think sometimes focusing too much on the technology is a problem. It's misleading. We had probably a few dozen thousands of consumers using their phones to pay, tap and pay. And we can tell you that the consumer experience works very, very well across all kinds of ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, geographies. It's a lot more intuitive as a gesture and the interaction to tap and to immediately know how much did you pay, how much you have left in your account, where, etc. Than the credit card. So I see no hurdle from the point of view of the form factor, the gesture, et cetera. It's more of an issue of the infrastructure, when it will be easy for you to link that to the account you want to pay from, when will it be that the merchants have the right infrastructure to accept that? And more and more it looks like a game of very, very high capital expenditure, where very large companies are willing to pay to play. And I can see then, once the infrastructure is in place, some opportunities for startups to go in between, sort of the spaces of the big ones. But the big opportunity of just moving the money seems to be more of a big company.
