How NFC is Taking Mobile Payments in Bold New Directions

Where would Uber be without GPS? How would Instagram look without high-resolution cameras? How lame would mobile games be without the gyroscope?

Smartphones (and a lot of other connected devices) are now wired with a wide range of remarkable tools, with more arriving all the time. It only takes a sharp developer and a bit of imagination to turn an overlooked piece of hardware into the next indispensable phone feature.

Near field communication is a good example. NFC chips have been around for years, installed in smartphones and other consumer devices. Then Apple embraced NFC to develop Apple Pay and now NFC is a common phone feature.

But there is still work to do. The payment industry tokenization standards used by Apple Pay and other mobile payment services have helped these services scale, and the standards have made it easier for payment services to work with credit and debit cards. But many payment services still do not accommodate customer-specific and merchant-specific use cases like loyalty programs and gift certificates.

We envision a world where NFC is the only step needed for any transaction—not only for payments but for loyalty points and rewards, for proximity offers, digital gift cards, coupons and more. We see all these added-value pieces living together in a single digital wallet, seamlessly using embedded NFC technology, without additional steps. Proximity alone should suffice. We think this is the key to fueling broad adoption of mobile payments.

To make it happen, NXP and Carta are combining the scalability and broad acceptance of NFC standards with openness and flexibility to enable unlimited opportunities to build merchant-driven value-adds into a single payment tool. It’s the best of all worlds.

Experience the advantages of the Carta platform with NXP’s leading NFC capabilities. Carta’s technology stack takes the same foundation that now powers large mobile wallet platforms like account issuance and tokenization and extends it with a suite of functionality that enables customizable applications to drive consumer engagement and a more rewarding experience. Through modular tools and powerful API-driven functions, Carta’s platform enables developers to create new and exciting products that will introduce the enhanced user experiences that have long been the vision for NFC—as well as others we’ve never dreamed of!

Working together, we can bring NFC to a wider market and create custom solutions that make the technology more useful in real life. Customers will be delighted to get 10% off at the register when they tap their phone to pay for their coffee and croissant. They’ll be excited to receive a personalized promotion pushed to their phone the moment they walk in the door. They’ll collect loyalty points without fishing for a card. They’ll tap their phone to use those points when they make a purchase.

And for vendors and payment providers, it means broad adoption, customer affinity and the chance to stay top of wallet. It means an answer to the all-too-common consumer question: Why should I pay with a tap instead of my old plastic card?  Very soon, it will mean users putting those cards in the drawer and wondering how they ever got by without NFC technology.

Read more about Carta’s platform.