A nice little piece from my UK colleague Mike Adams, our Marketing Manager at mBlox...

In 2011, the incorporation of Near Field Communication (“NFC”) on mobile phones will become ubiquitous thanks to a whole new generation of handsets from Apple, Nokia, RIM and the Android clones.  With an RFID chip built into most new handsets, contactless payments with a mobile phone will become as natural as RFID cards such as Oyster, Navigo and Octopus used in various parts of the world, while US retailers will deploy NFC terminals thanks to the new Isis initiative from AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon.

With this NFC revolution comes a big opportunity for good old-fashioned SMS and PSMS to grow too, since both of these simpler messaging technologies can ideally be tied to an NFC solution.

SMS transaction alerts are ideal when you’re travelling abroad and your NFC-enabled handset doesn’t have a data connection, and relies only on SMS to communicate with a mobile operator. This scenario is typical when you’re travelling abroad and don’t want to activate data roaming or don’t want to rely on an app to keep track of your NFC expenses.

In addition, if you’re out of cash in an area without any cash point nearby and don’t have a credit card (which is typical for more than 30% of the U.S. population), with an NFC-enabled mobile handset you can simply send a text message to a premium short code, and a few dollars of credit from your mobile account will be instantly transferred to your handset, which will allow you to buy that delicious bagel, cup of coffee or other product you’d like to pay for.  It’s as simple as that.

This NFC revolution is very exciting, especially for the entire SMS and PSMS ecosystem who still have a compelling proposition for consumers using new contactless payment technologies.  With 78% of UK consumers clamouring for a mobile wallet payment solution, retailers should consider NFC solutions that fit within consumers’ current behaviours and expectations, including the universal communication and payment mechanism that is SMS/PSMS.

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