David Furlonger, Gartner's senior analyst for the financial sector, is skeptical about mobile banking applications and near field communication (NFC) payment systems.He rightly notes that Australian banks have struggled to profit from such ventures and that, globally, most users are just checking account balances, which might positively affect operating costs or improve customer satisfaction, but which do not create new revenues.
“Nearly all the interactions on mobile so far have been checking balances,” he said. “That doesn't sound like a way to make money.”
Some amount of skepticism is healthy. Though the mobile payments, mobile wallet and mobile commerce businesses are in a higher tempo state at the moment, lots of work yet has to be done to create viable business ecosystems. Most retailers and consumers probably do not yet see a clear reason to add NFC or other forms of mobile payment, and so the base of terminals and devices remains miniscule.
So reasonable skepticism about what can happen immediately, or "soon," is warranted. But there has been an undeniable quickening of tempo in 2011. Wherever we are going, we will get there faster than seemed likely in 2010.
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