Category: NFC Technology

According to industry leaders, the technology is now starting a wave in the country.

According to some of the latest data out of Canada, mobile payments, such as money transfers, are starting to pick up quite quickly, as the industry reaches the close of its second year within the country.

Contactless transactions, specifically, are starting to take hold inside that country.

Though the case on the other side of the world, in India, is showing a massive hesitation to adopt mobile payments technology, the exact opposite appears to be happening in Canada. The true strength in this part of the industry appears to be in contactless technology – NFC technology. Tap and go is catching on and Canadians are starting to become accustomed to it.

MasterCard has now ranked Canada as the second most prepared country for mobile payments.

The ranking from MasterCard placed only Singapore ahead of Canada in terms of being prepared for the widespread adoption of mobile payments. It assigned a score of 0 to 100. Canada scored a 42, whereas Singapore received a score of 45.6. The global average was 33.2.

That said, despite the widespread adoption of smartphones in India and its tremendous population, it is still lagging behind the world at a score of only 31.5. This ranking was the result of the data accumulated by MasterCard in a survey that involved the participation of mobile networks, banks, and governments. It revealed that in the Mobile Commerce Clusters score, Canada has fared very well.

At the same time, aside from mobile payments, the survey also identified a number of other trends. For example, credit and debit cards are continuing to grow their share of the overall industry over other methods such as cash and checks. Approximately one in three total transactions are done by cash, and card transactions are picking up considerably within the sound financial system of that country.

Smartphone penetration is also considerable in Canada. That, along with the cooperation of the government, mobile networks, and banks, has meant that this market is increasingly prepared to take part in mobile payments on a mainstream scale.

The growth of the use of this tech has been quite slow but people are adopting near field communication.

It has been slightly over one year since mobile payments companies, such as banks and network operators, had been doing everything they could to make sure that they had worked NFC technology into their systems so that they would be able to keep up with what they felt was an overwhelmingly large opportunity as enabled devices would flood the marketplace.

They were under the impression that Apple would soon be releasing an enabled device.

Since that time, several Apple devices have been launched and not one of them has included the NFC technology that had been anticipated. Though the preparations for near field communications had skyrocketed, and the tech had been worked into everything from mobile wallets to marketing, the growth of the penetration of the actual devices occurred much more slowly than anticipated.

iPhones still do not feature NFC technology among their options and companies have had to look to other avenues.

Google Wallet, Isis, and even MasterCard have all recently announced that although they have not abandoned their use of NFC technology, they are implementing additional methods in order to make sure that their services would be accessible by a larger number of consumers. For the most part, this has meant that QR codes – the two dimensional barcodes that had once been believed to have limited days left because of the upcoming popularity of near field communication tech – have been added to these massive systems.

That said, it appears that all is not lost for NFC technology. The majority of the latest Android smartphones do contain these chips and as they start to spread throughout the world – and dominate the shipments of smartphones on a global scale – it has meant that systems relating to this tech are starting to launch. Though they haven’t taken off at the rate that had been initially expected, they are now experiencing a healthy, moderate growth.

In fact, according to Strategy Analytics market research, though the expectations for the demand for NFC technology have been reduced, it is still estimated that by the end of 2017, payments using this tech will have reached $48 billion.