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BLOGGER: NAOMI WEISER

It’s not just the Royal Wedding that will make 2011 a year to remember – also sharing the limelight is the rise and rise of mobile payments, with analyst group Forrester declaring 2011 as the year when Near Field Communication (NFC) will reach the hands of millions of consumers. NFC is the technology behind payment transactions carried out on mobile phones, either by using a mobile network to initiate or authorize transactions, or via contactless systems that use a mobile phone instead of a credit card. So as far as the user is concerned, you’ll be able to just wave your phone at a payment terminal, instead of having to swipe a card.

How significant will this be? Well, according to a new Amdocs-commissioned comprehensive survey of thousands of users across five different European countries, twenty-two percent actually identified mobile payments  as “the most important development of the coming decade”.  Strong words, but they echo those of Gerry McQuade, chief development officer at Everything Everywhere, who believes that the mobile payments partnership of Barclaycard, Everything Everywhere, Orange and Gemalto to be launched in the next few months will be “ the biggest revolution in payments since credit cards were introduced in the UK”. The partnership is hoping their customers will be the first to be able to use their mobile devices to make payments wherever contactless payments are accepted in the UK. But O2 is hot at their heels, with plans to roll out a virtual wallet service before the end of this year.

Examples of other NFC mobile payments projects include Vodafone’s NFC trial with Germany’s Deutsche Bahn on a ticketing and mobile payments system, Visa’s pilot scheme of Visa payWave terminals that were installed at select New York City subway stations, and plans by major UK retailers Boots and Tesco to add cashless points. On the device side, this year’s Mobile World Congress already had NFC devices on display, Apple’s iPhone 5 is expected to be NFC-ready, and according to Juniper Research, one in five smartphones will contain NFC technology by 2014. But three years is too long to wait for American Express,whose just-launched Serve platform will allow consumers to make mobile transactions without NFC chips.

And it won’t just be gymnastics or diving that will capture our attention at the 2012 Olympics in London – Samsung and Visa will be showcasing their innovative technology alliance at the Games. Users will be able to test out Samsung’s new mobile-payment smartphones containing NFC technology at more than 60,000 locations, by simply tapping their phone against a reader that accepts Visa’s contactless SIM card to make a Visa payment. This isn’t just a one-off experiment. As Seokpil Kim, president & CEO of Samsung Electronics Europe explains, their objectives are to roll this out on a global scale: “we plan to expand the service to other countries in Europe and around the world where contactless payment facilities are available in the near future.”

Will people feel safe using their phone as a wallet? According to the Amdocs survey mentioned earlier, European consumers believe service providers will be able to deliver the appropriate level of security. So when you’re at the Olympics sending photos from your smartphone of wonderboy Tom Daley vaulting elegantly off the diving board, remember that there’s more you can do with your phone than just communicating.