Tag Archives: retail payments strategy

Has Apple made NFC irrelevant?

In The future of exchanging value{{1}} I, along with Peter Williams and Ian Harper at Deloitte, pointed out that a successful retail payments strategy should be founded on empowering consumers and merchants to transact when and where they want to. Investing in technologies such as near-field communication (NFC) networks might allow you to shave a couple of seconds off the transaction time once customer was at the till, but it ignores the fact that consumers are increasingly transacting away from the till as mobile phones and ubiquitous connectivity allow them to transact when and where they want to.

[[1]]Peter Evans-Greenwood, Ian Harper, Peter Williams (2012), The future of exchanging value, Deloitte[[1]]

We are seeing a shift from technology acquisition to technology use. Rather than building a payment strategy around the acquisition of a new technology (such as NFC), a successful strategy needs to be based on streamlining the buying journey. While NFC might enable the consumer to save a few seconds at the till, it does not address the far larger time they spent waiting in the queue beforehand. A more valuable solution might avoid the need to queue entirely. This is a design-led approach, focused on the overall problem the customer is solving and the context in which they are solving. Technologies are pulled into the payment strategy as needed, rather than building the strategy around the acquisition of an asset or capability.

Amazon used this approach with the development of the company’s mobile application, one that allows you snap an image of a barcode to purchase a product. Bricks-and-morter retailers see this as showrooming and unsportsmanlike. Many consumers, however, love the idea.

As I pointed out in The destruction of traditional retail{{2}}:

[[2]]The destruction of traditional retail @ PEG[[2]]

If you’re standing in an aisle casually browsing products then Amazon’s till is closer to you than the one at the front of the store[4]. You also don’t need to worry about carrying your purchase home.

The challenge for retailers (from The future of exchanging value) is to:

… manage a portfolio of technologies, from existing payment infrastructure through NFC to emerging tools, combining them to enable customers to transact when and how they need to.

The way for bricks-and-morter retailers to fight showrooming is use a range of low-cost consumer technologies to make it more convenient to transact with them than an internet retailer.

Apple showed how this might be done during the What’s New in Core Location presentation at the company’s recent Worldwide Developers Conference.

Imagine you walk into Jay’s Donut Shop. iBeacons from Core Location are accurate enough for the retailer to be sure that you have walked in, while other location technologies (such as GPS or those based on Wi-Fi) could, at best, provide a list of guesses. You don’t even need to check in. You could order you donuts before you entered the shop. When you reach the counter your iPhone would display a QR code that a clerk uses to verify the purchase. You grab your donuts and leave, the transaction charged to your iTunes account and your receipt already on your phone.

As Mike Elgan points out in his post Why Apple’s ‘indoor GPS’ plan is brilliant{{3}}, it’s not much of stretch to consider some much more interesting scenarios.

[[3]]Mike Elgan (14th September 2013), Why Apple’s ‘indoor GPS’ plan is brilliant, Computer World.[[3]]

A customer could scan the labels on clothing, process the transaction on the phone, then stroll out of the store with purchases in hand (the alarm would be de-activated for those items).

This is a solution that could be supported tomorrow on all iPhone 4Ss through to the new iPhone 5C. The hardware required to create an iBeacon is already available and it’s cheap, often in the 10s of US$.

NFC continues to struggle and it seems that Apple might have pulled together a solution that makes it irrelevent.