Little Interest In The US For Mobile Wallet Payments

NFC may be extremely hyped up about by all the big companies such as the major carriers in the US – AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile and they have teamed up with companies like Isis and Google to put together mobile payment services that utilize NFC technology. The hype was big enough that even rumors regarding whether the next generation iPhone will be seeing NFC technology were starting to emerge.

What about on the consumer end?

As it turns out in a survey conducted with a sampling of 1,000 US consumers, 21% said that they would buy a mobile phone that is equipped with NFC. The remaining 79% were not too positive with 53% showing no interest in owning a phone with NFC technology and the remaining 26% who did not even know what NFC technology was. Granted this is relatively new technology for US consumers, unlike countries in Japan where NFC has been widely adopted and used in a variety of day-to-day services.

It looks like mobile payment services like Google Wallet will need to work harder to promote their services and reassure the public because half of those who expressed disinterest said that they did not trust those companies regarding security and privacy.