Substantial rollouts of NFC at the point of sale are still three to five years off, said David Messenger, executive vice president for online and mobile in American Express’ Enterprise Growth unit, though he predicted NFC would eventually become a “big force” in payments and other mobile commerce.
Messenger, speaking at the recent NFC Payments USA conference in Miami, also pointed to the importance of mining customer data in the coming era of mobile commerce. And he questioned how open Google–a potential m-commerce competitor to AmEx–will be with its Google Wallet platform.
NFC POS Penetration Remains Low
Messenger noted that only about 1.7% of POS terminals in the United States now support contactless payment or NFC and said other technologies would have to bridge the gap until merchants roll out NFC-enabled terminals more widely.