Widespread use of this technology may not arrive until 2020, according to some experts.
Though many companies and smartphone experts are counting on the rapid adoption of mobile payments and wallets over the next few years in the United States, there are some who believe that it will take a while for Americans to embrace this technology.
This perspective has aligned closely with the suggestion that U.S. NFC technology adoption could be slow.
A panel of mobile payments experts have stated that American adoption of near field communications may experience notable delays. According to the head of mobile commerce for Barclaycard U.S., Dekkers Davidson, it could take as long as eight years for this widespread use to kick in within the country.
Davidson spoke about mobile payments at the MobileCon conference.
At the smartphone IT conference suggested that it would take between five and eight years before even one quarter of wireless device using people in the United States begin to use digital wallet apps. He also pointed out that it took eight years before people in Japan adopted the technology to that level.
Davidson was joined by a number of other mobile payments experts in the mcommerce conference panel. Those members explained that the reason that it will be such a long time before the technology is widely used is directly linked to the consumers, themselves. It is very common for Americans to be very comfortable and used to using their traditional credit cards.
For this reason, it is not a high priority among American shoppers to change their habits from the area in which they are comfortable to a new technology that uses NFC chips to make payments at terminals that with the appropriate readers.
Another member of the panel, the ISIS chief marketing officer, Ryan Hughes, said that “no consumers are really asking for [mobile payments]”. ISIS is a joint venture among three of the leading American wireless carriers: Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile USA. This venture is focused on the deployment of NFC payment terminals in order to allow purchases to be made using NFC enabled smartphones.
