NFC in China, The Next Big Solution to Mobile Payment

This post is written by our Guest Editor, Vaibhav Puri, CEO & Founder, of Taggito, a NFC-focused mobile start-up. You can reach him on vaibhav@taggito.com

Near Field Communication (or NFC) is a contactless communication technology that operates at 13.56Mhz and allows two NFC enabled devices such as a smartphone, NFC tag or a contactless POS to communicate with each other when touched or brought close enough (at a distance of few centimeters) to one another. Once the two devices instantaneously connect a transaction such as payment or data such as URLs, vCards etc. can be exchanged between the two devices.

In China as in the rest of the world we are seeing mobile payments using NFC gain traction. To begin with let’s have a look at the NFC payment ecosystem in the United States where Google introduced Google Wallet for the Android based Galaxy Nexus phones allowing users to pay at departmental stores such as Macy’s using their Google Wallet application. This soon ran into problems with mobile operators such as Verizon who blocked this application on Nexus phones operating on their network. But why?

What you get

Full access to all premium content and our full archives

Members'-only newsletters

Preferential access and discounts to all TechNode events

Direct access to the TechNode newsroom