Neil Hughes
Apple this week officially joined the NFC Forum, a nonprofit industry association that promotes the short-range wireless technology essential to secure mobile payment services, including Apple Pay.
Representing Apple on the NFC Forum's board of directors is Aon Mujtaba, the company's director of Wireless Systems Engineering. Mujtaba has been credited with multiple wireless patents owned by Apple.
"The top tier of NFC Forum membership, sponsor membership, entitles an organization to a seat on the NFC Forum board of directors, the association's governing body," NFC Forum director Paula Hunter said in a statement to NFC World. "We are delighted to welcome Apple to our board of directors as an NFC Forum sponsor member."
The NFC Forum was launched as a nonprofit industry association in 2004. It is a collaboration between chipmakers, communications companies, and consumer electronics makers.
Other sponsors of the NFC Forum include Google, Samsung, Intel, Sony, Broadcom, Visa, MasterCard, Nokia, and Qualcomm.
Though NFC technology has been around for years, interest in it, particularly for mobile payments, has surged since Apple adopted it in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. They were joined this year by the Apple Watch, all of which are capable of authorizing secure wireless transactions with Apple Pay.
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22 Comments
I hope they lead an aggressive campaign around merchants -- encouraging broad deployment of NFC at points-of-sale. All the technologies are in place... we just need merchants (large & small) to make it accessible to shoppers.
One standard for all NFC payments will happen soon. Eventually all NFC payments will all be the same just like credit cards are now. Good for the consumer.
I think this is good news. Any time Apple can be seen as partnering with other companies, makes the introduction of new Apple technologies/standards seem less "walled garden" and more leading among peers.
[quote name="Slprescott" url="/t/187688/apple-joins-nfc-forum-will-help-shape-future-of-wireless-payments/0_100#post_2759957"]I hope they lead an aggressive campaign around merchants -- encouraging broad deployment of NFC at points-of-sale. All the technologies are in place... we just need merchants (large & small) to make it accessible to shoppers.[/quote] It's happening. Slowly but it's happening. It's not as easy as you think it is as the cost to the business is high. Plus here in the US, places like restaurants will be slower as the systems in place are not even remotely capable to handle NFC. The entire OS system and the computers would have to be replaced. Not something that's cheap at all.
This and the (unrelated) support of USB-C are recent examples of Apple cooperating with industry partners on interoperability. It's a slight opening the "walled garden"... making it easier for people to enter the garden since it uses some technologies that exist outside the garden.