After a 6 month trial of near field communication (NFC) technology in the Spanish town of Sitges that began in May 2010, results have been released showing how people used what many are calling the future of cash. The trial was run by Telefónica, one of the largest operators in Europe, and La Caixa bank. They gave 1,500 people a Samsung S5230 NFC enabled device and equipped 500 local merchants with payment terminals that support them. It was found that people using the NFC equipped mobile phone conducted 30% more transactions than people who just use plastic cards. Those transaction were also, on average, 23% higher in value. Adoption was phenomenal with 90% of the 1,500 people in the trial actually using their device to make a payment; the average age of users was 46 years old.
Most than half the purchases, roughly 60%, were equal to 20 Euros or less. Supermarkets tended to be the most popular location transaction point; 57% of all payments processed happened there. The next popular spot to spend money was restaurants with 14% of all payments. Of the 1,350 people who used their new phone to make a purchase 1,215 of them (90%) said they’d like to continue using their device to buy things.
All this is obviously exciting, but even the partners admit that it’s going to take between 3 and 5 years for this type of technology to be rolled out and eventually become mainstream. With Android 2.3 getting basic NFC functionality, and rumors of the next generation iPhone also getting some tap to pay capabilities, we’re hoping we can start buying our daily cup of coffee with nothing but a smartphone … but realistically we know it’s going to be a while.
Over on the other side of the pond 3 of the 4 large American operators have started a project called Isis that intends to equip future devices with NFC, but they haven’t committed to a certain launch date.
[Photo above is not of the Samsung S5230, but does show another Samsung NFC enabled device, the SHW-A170K]