Lyndon Lee, enterprise consultant architect at retail giant Tesco, held no punches when he told listeners exactly what he thought about the future of NFC mobile payments last week.
“NFC was revolutionary 10 years ago but I think it just might have passed its sell-by date,” Lee said to the audience at the Mobile Payments and Value Added Services 2013 conference in London, reports NFC World.
Lee went on to explain the complexity of the NFC mobile payment process and the lack of incentive the retailer has to adopt the technology. He reiterated that the process is challenging for customers and the value does not measure up to the effort. He believes that if the payment process is not easy to apply, then customers will lose interest, and as a consequence the market becomes stagnant. Furthermore, Lee pointed out that NFC technology was a trendy commodity 10 years ago, but questioned if the coming generations will still find the service ‘cool’.
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Tesco has no future plans to roll out any type of NFC mobile services, however Lee did acknowledge the value in contactless card payments.
In an interview with NFC World after his presentation, Lee explained, “Mobile NFC is unappealing. Contactless cards, I have no doubt about. They work now and they have no difficulties.”
With a central focus on the consumer relationship and how to maximize value, Tesco has revealed they are currently working on creating a digital wallet. The digital wallet will aim to improve marketing efforts and the Tesco loyalty program, and may not even include a payments option. Lee said that the company saw no need to offer alternative payments with the digital wallet.
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“We have a payment system in place already and we don’t want to disrupt that if it doesn’t add any value,” he said to the audience.
To read the full story at NFC World click here.
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