According to Lyndon Lee, Enterprise Consultant Architect at Tesco, NFC mobile payments are too complicated with little value offered. Speaking to attendees at the Mobile Payments and Value Added Services 2013 Conference in London this week, Lee believes too many parties are involved.
“NFC was revolutionary 10 years ago but I think it just might have passed its sell-by date”, Lee said. “We are developing a digital wallet, focusing on marketing and loyalty aspects, but payment may not enter the wallet.”
“Is mobile NFC at the right place, at the right time? I don’t see any real movement or activity. NFC usability is not really revolutionary and, for the general public, is it really that cool? I think the next generation won’t think it’s cool enough for them and they won’t use it.
“But this is my opinion. NFC was revolutionary 10 years ago but I think it just might have passed its sell-by date. Usability is a big question and we need to crack this.
“At Tesco, we focus entirely on the consumer relationship. We are developing a digital wallet, focusing on marketing and loyalty aspects, but payment may not enter the wallet. We have a payment system in place already and we don’t want to disrupt it if it doesn’t add any value.
“If it doesn’t give us any value to adopt it, why should we do it?”
Whitepapers
Related reading
Central banks best suited to issue digital currencies
By Aaran Fronda A recent report by the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) said that central banks rather than private ... read more
Instant payments: innovations inbound for corporates
In 2020, instant payments look set to continue their current trajectory to become the biggest trend in payments. While these schemes already offer numerous benefits to corporates, leveraging innovations such as APIs and request to pay will go some way to unlocking their full potential, argues Michael Knetsch
Obstacles exist for banks to meet ECB’s instant payments goal
The cost of joining instant payment platforms will be one of many hurdles banks and payment services providers must overcome to meet ... read more
Banks must be aware of “biases” in data used to train ML models
Financial institutions need to be conscious of biases in the historical data that is being used to train machine learning (ML) models, ... read more