Kenya’s leading telecommunication company, Safaricom, is set to unveil NFC-enabled SIM cards to M-Pesa. If they do so, it will be the first telecommunications company in the region to deploy NFC based transactions.
NFC (Near Field Communication) is a contactless system for Smartphones that allows them to communicate with each other by simply touching or bringing them together.
Speaking to HumanIPO, Safaricom CEO, Bob Collymore said, “In many ways Kenya has pioneered cashless micro-payment using the mobile phone (outside of Japan).” He also added that, “Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, or contactless payment, was in a fairly embryonic stage when M-Pesa was launched. Now that Kenyans have embraced cashless payment with more than two millions transactions a day, it’s inevitable that the technology will be introduced here.”
For this to be successful, Safaricom will have to build a vast NFC infrastructure thoughtout the country if they intend to convince service providers and end users to use this new service.
It would be interesting to see how this turns out for Safaricom once they are done with implementation.
Sources {HumanIPO, TechMoran}