Late 2011 and the early part of 2012 brought a lot of hype and exaggerated expectations to the NFC ecosystem, some of which we identified and discussed in a previous QuickCast. With our launch of the 2012 Voice of the Customer NFC series coming soon, we thought it would be useful to provide a retrospective analysis of what’s happened so far in 2012 and reset expectations in regards to the second half of this year and beyond. During this QuickCast, John Shuster reviews some of the major trends impacting the NFC ecosystem so far this year, focusing in on smart marketing and mobile wallets and giving some forecasts and expectations for the rest of 2012.
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Limited infrastructure and device availabilitySlow adoptionDifficult to justify/Lack of education Low supply-side revenuesFacilitated adoption in APAC and EMEA due to existing infrastructure, higher user comfort levels and government initiatives.Majority of revenues from horizontal applications like payment, ticketing, marketing and access controlIncreased enterprise investment in NFC solutions for internal (i.e., non customer-facing) applications, including physical security/access control, logical/network security/access control, workforce monitoring/management and tracking/tracing applications.The emergence of alternative (i.e., non-smartphone) NFC device form factors during 2012 and beyond will further broaden NFC’s appeal as well as the potential use cases it can serve—both for enterprise and consumer end users.Governmental investment in NFC initiatives in certain country markets (e.g., Korea, France) will help drive regional contactless infrastructure deployment, application development and adoption.NFC application opportunities/use cases range from the very simple (P2P, pairing, information access) to the more complex (contactless payment, e-commerce). VDC expects most near-term activity will be related to applications that are relatively simple to deploy, do not require the cooperation of multiple stakeholders/decision makers and are deployed within the confines of a “closed loop” environment. Certainly, contactless payment and other commerce applications represent a tremendous opportunity for NFC; however, in most regions, VDC expects that these applications will remain challenged by barriers related to stakeholder cooperation and the availability of contactless infrastructure.