Skip to main content

Near Field Communication Trial in U.S. Market

A new trial in Dallas, Texas, bringing together MasterCard, Nokia and retail convenience store 7-Eleven, will see Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled mobile phones equipped with MasterCard "PayPass" contactless payment capability. Up to 500 participants will take part in the six month trial.

A key aspect of the trial is over-the-air NFC payment provisioning using Giesecke & Devrient's (G&D) new chip management offering. Previous trials have relied on card issuers managing the provision of each handset before handing them over to each trial participant -- a method that would be a barrier to the wide scale adoption of NFC payments.

Alongside provisioning issues, established operators have also struggled with two key issues around NFC-enabled payments -- finding the new revenue streams to cover the cost of including the technology in their handsets and, fundamentally, the reduced control that NFC payments bring into their wireless service infrastructure. NFC payments bring banking organizations into the wireless ecosystem and new business models have to be developed to establish each parties control and revenue streams.

ABI Research senior analyst Jonathan Collins says, "This trial tests a trusted third party model, placing G&D's new offering in the middle ground between issuer and operator. Success could help provide a blueprint for other MVNO's and major wireless operators to start to test and deploy NFC themselves."

The trial bears out ABI Research's earlier forecast that while the largest wireless operators struggle to develop business models for NFC payments, it will be innovative MVNOs that will lead the way.

ABI Research studies show that NFC-enabled cellular phones will reach 450 million units in 2011, representing nearly 30 percent of handsets shipped worldwide in that year.

Popular posts from this blog

Trends Shaping the Global Smartphone Market

There is a pivotal shift within the global smartphone market. Recent data from IDC highlights a more cautious outlook for 2025, with projected worldwide smartphone shipments seeing a significantly reduced growth rate. This revised forecast underscores the intricate interplay of global economic factors and geopolitical dynamics on pervasive personal communication devices. IDC's latest update projects a mere 0.6 percent growth in worldwide smartphone shipments for 2025, a stark reduction from the earlier 2.3 percent expectation. Global Smartphone Market Development This recalibration is largely attributed to prevailing economic uncertainties, including inflationary pressures and rising unemployment, alongside the persistent specter of tariff volatility. Despite these global tensions, it's interesting to note that the United States and China are still identified as the primary drivers of this modest growth. China, a critical market, is forecast to achieve a 3 percent year-over-yea...