Three Dutch mobile operators (T-Mobile, Vodafone, KPN) are going to work together with three Dutch banks Rabobank, ABN Amro, ING) by forming a joint venture dedicated to launching NFC enabled services across the Netherlands in 2012 according to NFC World. This is the first time that a country in the European Union has seen such cooperation and it’ll be watched my many other nations as a possible template for how to deploy mobile payments. The problem with NFC is defining ownership of the customer. That may sound like a relic of ancient business, “owning the customer”, but the companies that sit at the points of intersection between point of sale, the financial transaction, and customer authentication, all want a stake at bringing home the bacon.
Visa doesn’t want to see their current dominant position in credit card payments be replaced by mobile operators. Banks don’t want to forfeit their relationships with customers since they play a pivotal role in local communities by giving loans to both small and big businesses alike. The mobile payments problem is not a technical one. The technology has been there for years, as witnessed by the outstanding success in Japan where nearly everyone swipes their mobile phone to buy things ranging from a can of soda at a vending machine to an expensive pair of concert tickets to see Madonna performing live. The problem involves drawing lines in the proverbial sand over who takes what and for how much.
A similar plan is set to take place in America between AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, in conjunction with Discover and Barclays. Predicting who is going to win is difficult and if the government steps in then it could take even longer for this to work. Then there’s the question of what happens if smaller players like Square or Apple become successful. Steve Jobs uses every keynote he can to remind people that his company has over 100 million credit cards on file. Those can potentially be used to create an interface between credit cards and NFC point of sale systems, but then you’ve got to ask yourself what about non-iPhone users?
Nokia has committed to launching Symbian based devices with NFC in 2011. The company has previously launchd NFC devices, but they’ve been low end feature phones, and the sole single wire protocol (SWP) enabled device they planned to bring to market, SWP being the standard that ties the NFC element inside a mobile phone to the SIM card for the sake of authentication, was cancelled at the last moment.