This week, Boku President and co-founder Ron Hirson was asked to contribute a guest editorial post for VentureBeat as a part of an ongoing series leading up to their second annual Mobile Summit conference.
Ron used the opportunity to follow up on his guest post from the previous year “Why does NFC matter? Does tap beat swipe for mobile payments?” and reflect a bit on the state of real-world mobile payments and NFC in particular.
The title of this year’s piece “The state of mobile payments: No more waiting on NFC” holds particular significance for our company, as we recently announced Boku Accounts: our new, carrier-distributed mobile payments platform. Boku Accounts combines the best of existing payments technologies (NFC, cards, and smartphone apps) to create a turnkey solution to enable real world mobile payments today, rather than waiting for merchants and consumers to adopt new technology. Here is an excerpt and link to the full article:
Think of consumers and merchants as two circles in a Venn diagram, with the intersection representing when a consumer with an NFC enabled device happens to find a merchant that accepts NFC payments. The overlap is incredibly small. This isn’t meant to say “NFC will never change the way we pay,” simply that it isn’t here yet.
Given both the incredible potential presented by mobile payments at the point-of-sale and the significant adoption challenges facing the technology, we are left with this question: “Why are we waiting for so many friction-laden events to happen?” Or, put another way, “Why are we waiting on NFC to deliver mobile payments with real value to merchants and customers?”