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Four Questions With JRE’s Satoshi Shibata-san About MaaS, Comfortable Cities […]

“Quiet” and “disruption” are not words normally butted-up against one another in a sentence. “Disruptions” by their very nature can be chaotic upheavals. And they are certainly not quiet.

More companies are looking to make payments more convenient and efficient — hence the development of frictionless payments, with technology like Near Field Communication (NFC) poised to push this technology even farther forward. Already, NFC is making contactless payment safer for both retailers and consumers, especially now, given today's global health situation. With the world’s two billion or so smartphones having NFC as a standard feature, we will examine why NFC is the future of frictionless payment.

Smartrac is an engaged, active member of the NFC Forum. One of the reasons for Smartrac’s involvement wth the NFC Forum is because of the participatiion of Amir Khoshniyati, its NFC Business Lead, and others at Smartrac in NFC Forum activities. It is not unusual to find Khoshniyati, staffing an NFC Forum booth at a trade show or a Smartrac employee contributing to an NFC Forum project.

The NFC Forum’s June 22-26 Member Meeting will be held online and accessible anywhere in the world. This is because travel restrictions along with “shelter-in-place” and similar agency orders and employer recommendations due to the Pandemic have many of us working indoors from home. This means we are relying on internet-based teleconferencing tools even more. Using videoconferencing to collaborate is an important aspect of your participation in the NFC Forum Member Meeting in June.

Annual sales of counterfeit goods total a staggering $1.7 trillion worldwide impacting confidence and product sales. collectID’s solution to this problem is to combine blockchain with NFC technology to create a complete product authentication ecosystem allowing every user to easily authenticate and trade any product by simply tapping the smartphone on the item. The Switzerland-based company provides products a unique identity based on its characteristics (e.g., watches) or a collectID NFC chip embedded into the product (e.g., sneaker). The unique identity of a product gets connected to a token that is safely stored on the blockchain forever.

New, exciting and innovative products using NFC can be found everywhere around the globe. We collect some of the best examples and display them on the NFC Forum Product Showcase. If you haven’t visited the NFC Forum Product Showcase page in a while – or ever – we encourage you to check it out and see some of the really cool ways NFC is being used in a wide variety of products and solutions.

What’s more important? Setting a goal to strive after? Or achieving the goal? You can’t have one without the other for sure, but PragmatIC CEO Scott White might respond to the above question by saying “Both”.

If you haven’t set up the digital wallet, now is the perfect time to get comfortable with this standard feature on your smartphone. Using a digital wallet lets you purchase goods and services with just a tap of your smartphone at checkout. This is called contactless payment. And, as the name implies, using contactless payment allows you to avoid touching cash and keypads during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Called “Tap and Pay” it reduces transmission of the virus and is the safer way to make payments for both the retailer and the consumer.

QR codes – a visual barcode that needs to be scanned with a mobile phone’s camera -- are currently used quite a bit in Asia. Other regions of the world where smartphones are more prevalent, near field communications (NFC) appears to be the technology of choice for payment and other uses. In fact, NFC technology is the standard enabler for tap-to-pay worldwide.