Business News Americas | March 16, 2011 | Christian Molinari
Undefined infrastructure issues and business development plans for near field communications (NFC) mean that the technology will not be readily available in Latin America in the near term, Bill Morelli, director of the mobile technologies group at IMS Research, told BNamericas.
“I’m not overly bullish about NFC in Latin America in the near term,” he said. “They’re still trying to work out how to effectively integrate NFC in basically every country outside of Japan. There are infrastructure issues where they have to get the technology more integrated in checkouts, toll stations, subway systems, etc.”
The other issue, which Morelli said is “massive,” is that of revenue share. “The operators very much would like to push NFC because if it’s a mobile-enabled transaction, then they feel they should get 0.5-1% [in the transaction fee] or similar, but the Visas, MasterCards, Banks of America and Citibanks have no interest in that. There are a lot of issues there, and there’s a lot of wrangling that will be going on around that, and I think that progress will be slow.”
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