Near Field Payments Coming Near Term?

I LOVE this post by Nitesh Patel at Strategy Analytics!

Kudos to Nitesh first for fessing up about his overly optimistic forecast for Near Field Communications (NFC) payments. Trust me, he is FAR from alone.

I agree that someday we'll ALL be paying for things, especially little things, with our smartphones (because we'll ALL have one of these by then), especially for little things. It is likely that we'll be using our smartphones for much more as well, such as providing ID, etc...

However, BEFORE that happens, both of the issues that Nitesh raises must be satisfied (at least):

- the infrastructure has to be put in place for NFC Payments. In order for this to happen, the OTHER thing needs to happen:

- the OPERATORS have to be SHOWN THE MONEY!

Time and again it happens that the technological capability to do something FAR outpaces the realistic ability to do so.....

Visa and Mastercard took in over $11B in 2008. AT&T, Verizon & T-Mobile are just looking for their cut in enabling what could be a significant growth market for these credit-card behemoths.

Only if these issues can be resolved (and once the NFC chipset vendors have beaten each other bloody to make the hardware pricing attractive to the handset manufacturers) will we see Nitesh's forecast become a reality....