A wide range of partners, attractive handsets, simplified adoption rules and a flexible regulatory regime all contribute to the take-up of NFC-based services, according to the participants in a Mobile Money Live webinar.  

“We learnt the importance of partnerships,” said Simon Best, Orange’s Strategy Director, referring to the operators’ NFC launches in the UK and France. And this means local government as well as industry partners with strong brands such as Barclaycard, according to Best, who also said the operator found that being first into the market “really helped,” for instance with gaining media coverage.

Orange also learnt that its activation process could have been smoother (“Three stages was too long”) and the importance of an NFC-based smartphone as good as anything else on the market. “We have to match the latest device. It wasn’t last year but it is now.”

Lionel Merrien, Director Solutions Sales, Gemalto North America, also highlighted how the whole sign-up process for customers – from service discovery to authentication to real-time card issuance – has to be streamlined.

Retailer engagement also came across as important. From their perspective the key is adding value, said Raja Ray, Verifone’s Director of Product Mangement. “We have to accept that from a retailers’ perspective, the ability to take a card payment by tapping a phone is a bit of a gimmick. Yes for fast food there is faster throughput but for many retailers it’s not there. But we think it will come.” What’s needed, he said, was to give retailers some vision.

Regulation is also an important area. Annie Smith, Head of Mobile Financial Services and m-Commerce with Digicel Pacific, which has just launched an NFC-based service, said its ability to offer financial inclusion eased the way with regulatory authorities in Tonga where it first launched. “It was good to see willingness of regulators to engage with us,” she said.