$200 Billion In NFC Payments By 2017

by Mike on October 21, 2012

Within the United States, Near Field Communication or NFC has been slow to catch on. As such, many people still haven’t used their phone as a payment device while making a point of sale purchase. Though things have been slowly progressing in the US, across the pond in Europe, NFC has started to take off. Like Japan, Europe has begun to enjoy the simplicity that NFC brings and it appears that over the next few years, the US will now start to reap some of the benefits of this technology as well.

A recent report by ABI Research shows that by the end of 2016, NFC payments are estimated to be more then $100 billion and by the following year, this number could be as high as $200 billion. These are huge numbers when you consider the fact that this year, NFC payments will amount to just $4 billion. Part of the reason why NFC has been slow to take off in the US is because of how limited the rollout of the technology has been. Customers that wanted to make a purchase using NFC would need to have a Sprint phone and then one that had an NFC chip. In addition to this, they would also need a Citi bank credit card. This will change very soon with the coming of Isis which is an NFC payment platform that will be supported by all major credit cards as well as three large US mobile carriers, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.

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