NFC has long been heralded as the holy grail for mobile. Paying with your phone is something that seems so futuristic and rightly so. The idea of getting rid of your wallet and just carrying a phone is tantalizing indeed, but most movements to kill the wallet have gone nowhere.
Google Wallet has been around for a while now, but it"s yet to see much traction around the world, let alone in the USA. There"s a few places you can pay, a few compatible handsets and a few different credit card companies that support it, but you have to really want it to actually bother getting it.
That"s where a New Zealand company is trying to change the world. In July 2008, Snapper launched a contactless payment card that allows commuters to "tag on" to their bus and pay almost magically. You just tap your card. There"s a few of these payment systems around the world such as the Octopus cards in Hong Kong and Oyster cards in London. Snapper specifically allows you to tag onto the bus or train, pay for a taxi and pay for small goods (like food at a corner store).
Their ability to pay for busses with a phone is a world first, and since the infrastructure and since there are already 375,000 Snapper cards already in circulation, it"s an obvious next step for the company. They don"t need to build the infrastructure since it"s already there, and the company is piggybacking on Visa/Mastercard"s plans to roll out NFC terminals to all stores nationwide so that soon enough, you"ll be able to buy anything with your phone.
The fear of having credit cards attached directly to the phone is the big reason NFC hasn"t been widely adopted yet, too. Users are scared of people in the street who could bump into them with a mobile terminal and steal money directly without them even knowing, and Miki vouches for how easy that really is. He says that it"s a "trivial" task to capture user information from phones, and that the threat will become all too real if Google Wallet ever reaches critical mass. Snapper gets around this by being a stored value service, only storing what the users chooses to top up the card with.
Miki says he sees the technology as replacing cash at Coke dispensing machines, parking meters and even on arcade machines and they"re working as fast as they can to revolutionize that space. It"ll be the end of loose change, as far as they"re concerned, and it makes sense for consumers. They"re moving to support every single device they can, and are constantly looking to support new platforms too. The team has even chased Microsoft for Windows Phone 8, since both HTC and Nokia"s offerings include both the standards that are required, but has met refusal from the company to provide the SDK before public availability.
Image Credit: 3news.co.nz
I borrowed a Samsung Galaxy SIII from Snapper for a week to trial actually using NFC in the real world, and it"s actually a strange feeling. Holding your phone against a reader on the bus to pay almost feels like something out of Minority Report. You just hold it against it and... it"s paid. It"s as simple as the card equivalent, and I can see the appeal immediately. As I catch the bus every day, I"ll be switching to a compatible handset as soon as I can.
The merits are obvious, and Snapper is keen to bring their technology to as many people as they can. Paying with your phone might feel futuristic, and a little out of reach, but in some parts of the world it"s already a reality. We"re hopeful that mobile device manufacturers will begin working together on a common set of standards so that it"s a more consistent experience and there"s no need to worry about what handset you end up buying, but right now the landscape is messy.