By the end of 2014, the Canadian communications giant has announced that people will prefer to pay with smartphones.
According to a statement that was released by Rogers Communications Inc. vice president of emerging technologies, David Robinson, by next year and beyond, mobile payments will become the preferred way for consumers to process their transactions.
This announcement was made as Robinson spoke to developers at a conference about Android in Toronto.
The hope from Rogers, which is already one of the major mobile payments players in the Canadian ecosystem, is that people will find it more appealing to use near field communications (NFC) technology as a type of digital wallet, than using their traditional plastic cards and cash. The company has broken down its smartphone based transaction push into three different phases, said Robinson.
Phase one had already occurred last year, when the company worked on NFC based mobile payments tech.
It emulated an NFC SIM card that would be inserted into smartphones and function as a mobile payments method without causing a disruption to the infrastructure of the network. The second phase has occurred this year, when the company worked to actually introduce the technology to consumers and has been encouraging them to give mobile wallets a try using the card that Rogers had developed during the previous phase.
The third phase, which Robinson says will be happening next year and beyond, will cause mobile payments to become the preferred platform of Canadian consumers, according to the company. He explained that “There will be lots of wallets, and there’s going to be lots of user interfaces … But we believe the role for a carrier wallet is to do the really nasty payment stuff because it’s hard.” He also added that “And to push it, and make it available and make it open with software development kits, that’s the difference between what we used to do and what we’re doing today.”
Robinson has explained that the effort to bring NFC technology to Canadians has been an ongoing effort over the past eight years. The goal is to make it possible for – one day – every smartphone in the world to be able to be used for mobile payments purposes.
