Editorial Articles

Greg Taylor, Design & UI/UX Director, EMEA at TigerSpike explains why 2011 may be the year of the mobile wallet

Combining the prevalence of social networking with mobile commerce is, in many people’s eyes, the path to mobile nirvana. With many major industry players pushing mobile commerce, rollouts of various mobile payment technologies and mash-ups are progressing – but how smooth is the path to widespread adoption and where does it lead?

NFC, or Near Field Communication, has been around for a number of years in a number of applications including how we unlock doors, how we often access public transport and sometimes how we pay for goods and services. This technology also exists in contactless payment cards, and also in mobile devices. Alliances are now forming in the social networking, financial, and technology sectors that may allow NFC mobile payments to become mainstream. We need not look much further than the recent Foursquare and American Express partnership to see that social networks may indeed be the catalyst for widespread adoption.

The first fruit of the Foursquare AMEX partnership was the rollout of the ‘Social Currency’ iPhone app – where users share their purchase wants and needs via photos that are then shared within their social network (with check-ins also appearing in the users Foursquare application). Their next foray sees AMEX cardholders link to their Foursquare accounts, where they can then be notified of deals and are encouraged to unlock them by paying with their American Express card. The next logical step is to explore a check-in utilising NFC. In fact, if you are visiting the Foursquare office you can allegedly check-in by swiping your NFC-enabled Android handset across a poster pasted up on their office wall.

The applications of NFC are vast and potentially lucrative, however there are still many known barriers to NFC adoption that include security concerns, lack of infrastructure, changing users behaviour and handset battery life. However, the opportunity that lies within social networks appears to override these barriers in many ways, and we will continue to see a push in the mobile payment sector in 2011. Juniper Research predicts 1 in 5 smartphones will be NFC enabled by 2014 – it’s this type of prediction that once again echo’s industries willingness to overcome the barriers ahead. With this in mind, 2011 may indeed become the year of the mobile wallet.


www.tigerspike.com