The ultimate, wide deployment of NFC payments will bring a lot of convenience to shoppers and retailers in future. In the meantime, many hurdles must still be crossed in order to make this technology widely available. Not least of these is the availability of the handsets and a business case that is understood by all stakeholders.The question is what participants should do in the meantime to prepare themselves for the ultimate reality of NFC payments. What can mobile operators do to be better prepared for NFC payments? They should, of course, experiment and pilot the technology, they should work with standard bodies to develop the standards and with banks and credit card organisations to roll out the acquiring infrastructure. All of these things are important, but does not really make major inroads in mobile banking today. Also, it is difficult to build the business cases for the investment required.
One way for mobile operators to prepare for NFC payments, is to actively roll-out remote payments to as large a part of their subscriber base as is possible. The key is to do this in such a way that the subscriber base can be converted to NFC payments quickly and at low cost. This can easily be done with today's technology and the business case is much more robust. Subscribers with mobile wallets and the right operator logic on the phone can be converted for NFC payments when handsets arrive.