The implications here are obviously monstrous. With the recently announced PassBook application (which we detailed prior to its announcement while speculating about an NFC tie-in), Apple will be set to compete with Google Wallet and the similar service Microsoft unveiled last week. Apple could tie in with a payment processor like Citibank’s PayPass system for credit card transactions or it could become a payment processor of sorts with its hundreds of millions of credit cards already on file at iTunes.
NFC would also allow iPhone users a quick and easy way to share files from one iOS device to another.
Jim Peters, CTO of SITA, agrees that NFC is coming to iPhone and retailers should prepare for it…
“Opinion is that Apple is going to incorporate NFC into Passbook. Apple just thinks about how they can make it really easy for the user, and then they figure out how to monetise it. They don’t think about how to monetise it and then tell the user what they can have. It doesn’t work like that,” said Peters.
“There aren’t any transactions in it yet, but I think that’s how Apple is going to sneak up on the industry. They are going to get people used to using it and then all of a sudden they will allow credit cards to be used in there, on the next iPhone, which will include NFC.”
He added: “There is a lot of debate that NFC will never take off because of all the arguments. But you need to get ready, this is coming. This is going to happen. By the end of the year the majority of smartphones that you go and buy will have NFC on them. If in October the next iPhone comes out and it has NFC on it, it’s game over.”
This is not the first we have heard that iPhone 5 would have NFC, however.
.According to two people with knowledge of the inner workings of a coming iteration of the Apple iPhone – although not necessarily the next one –a chip made by Qualcomm for the phone’s processor will also include near-field communication technology, known as N.F.C. This technology enables short-range wireless communications between the phone and an N.F.C reader, and can be used to make mobile payments. It is unclear which version of an iPhone this technology would be built into.The iPhone 4S didn’t have NFC but that makes its successor a more likely candidate. In the implementation patented above, financial settings would be managed through iTunes but since Apple has recently made more of these types of features available on iOS, these renderings may be outdated.
Ed McLaughlin, who heads emerging payments at MasterCard, had an exchange with Fast Company earlier this year that seemed to indicate Apple was entering the Credit card/payments market as well:
…when asked to give an estimate for
when smartphone payments would become commonplace (in other words, would
2012 be the year of NFC or contactless tech?), McLaughlin demurred–and
may have dropped a hint about Apple’s future in the industry.
“The timeline is always as rapid as it
makes sense for consumers,” he says. “That’s a combination of having a
critical mass of the merchants, which is what you’re seeing right now,
and getting devices into the hands of consumers. I don’t know of a
handset manufacturer that isn’t in process of making sure their stuff is
PayPass ready.”
So that would include Apple then?
“Um, there are…like I say, [I don't
know of] any handset maker out there,” McLaughlin says. “Now, when we
have discussions with our partners, and they ask us not to disclose
them, we don’t.”
If all that weren’t enough, we’d heard a well-connected developer tell us back in January that Apple was working on NFC, as well as spotting some well-placed hirings in the NFC field. View the original article here 
No comments:
Post a Comment