Mobile phone made finance simple

Statistics showed that the top five trends of the technology world to define year 2011 would be Second Screen Apps, HTML 5, Group Messaging, Online Network Privacy, and most importantly, Mobile Payments. The market has been very busy in 2011, as Google, Ebay, credit card companies, banks, carriers, and a number of startups jostle for position.

Among all the mobile payment methods, one of the defining features of the next generation of smart phones, which are starting to come out and thriving nowadays, would be a technology called Near Field Communication (NFC). NFC refers to a set of standards for mobile devices that allows them to communicate wirelessly by either touching or bringing them into close proximity (a few centimeters  far) with another NFC-enabled device. Speaking of the NFC technology, people might immediately think of barcodes, Quick Response Codes and other electronic tags as using NFC, but unlike those examples with only one-way of communication, let's say, between the scanner and the tag, NFC allows two-way communications, which provides a more dynamic medium where more information can be transmitted.

Since the capability of NFC technology, such as low speed, and short range of connection area, is coupled with mobile devices that are portable, highly personal and attached to an individual,  the technology has a broad range of applications, which generally fall into three main categories: the access controls to buildings, parking lots, or other vehicle and equipment services; social networking and information sharing, where people share images, articles, application, exchange business cards, personal information, or download data, etc; and finally the payment methods and facilitation, such as paying or the services and goods including mobile banking transfers and payments, groceries, bus or taxi fares, flight tickets, concert tickets, etc.

Compatible with the existing contactless infrastructure, NFC is characterized by a natural and intuitive 'just touch' movement with great simplicity and convenience. When people are shopping in the store, instead of whipping out your wallet, via NFC you'll simply tap or wave your phone to make a payment. This has major implications for banking institutions and the four main payment networks in the US, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover. All have been actively preparing for this sea change in how we pay for things. In 2011, Visa has already teamed up with Samsung in order to bring NFC-enabled mobile payments to the London 2012 Olympics. With any NFC-capable phone, mobile users will be able to pay for purchases using only their phone at over 60,000 locations in London. Also, American Express has a digital payments and commerce platform called Serve, which recently announced its first carrier deal since launching in March of 2011. As we can tell, Mobile contactless services will for sure change people's daily lives. With this continuously updating technology, people will be able to make payments more quickly and more accurately.

Manufacturers and industry pundits have been claiming that NFC will hit its stride this year. Several NFC's benefits to the consumers and businesses have been defined as being intuitive, that requires no more than a simple touch; being versatile that NFC is ideally suited to the broadest range of industries and fields; and being open and standards-based, that the underlying layers of NFC technology follow universally implemented ISO, ECMA, and ETSI standards. Besides the obvious existing benefits, people should also be alert with the critical issues and concerns regarding security for transactions as well to prevent themselves from pursuing cutting-edge technologies while ignoring the accompanying risks and challenges since all the flourishing technologies or innovations come with pros and cons.

In the next blog, we will talk about besides NFC's benefits provided to the customers and businesses, who would probably make profits from this booming technology?

Below is a clip that introduces the NFC application for the mobile payment. Enjoy!