For financial institutions and retailers investments in mobile
NFC payments are intended to attack cash transactions and provide a faster
checkout in the retail environment. NFC and their wallet application furthermore
offers multiple loyalty, discount and interaction functions with the actual
shop environment. Great technology, secure as EMV but for payments only not a
huge differentiator compared to plastic cards as they provide more or less the
same functionality and user experience. In order to reduce cash at higher pace my guess is that remote mobile payments will play a significant role that is currently being underestimated.

Remote mobile payments should not only be positioned as the on the road payment facility for buying goods and services from mobile websites. They support and provide new behaviour with enhanced customer user experiences.

Great examples are used in the actual store like Starbucks or
even when approaching the store like with Square Card Case. Square provides a
completely new merchant segment with the ability to accept electronic payments
so very effective in the war on cash!  They enhance the consumer experience
greatly by recognizing the mobile phone, the owner, his product preferences and
securely stored payment credentials. The Card Case app uses a token to unlock
the remotely stored credit card data.

This is a method that offers great opportunities for retailers to provide their unique app or wallet based checkout facility that could be used for any channel. Retailers could invite regular consumers to store in PCI compliant fashion payment card details at the retailers payment services provider and use a token via apps for transaction purposes. This functionality is currently in use with recurring payment solutions for e-commerce. Such remote mobile payments can be offered to clients of broadcast  companies enabling TV commerce like video on demand, user participation, voting, receive vouchers from advertisers, etc. Another possibility would be to connect to the huge credit card hubs that Amazon and Apple have become but so far they do not open up for this services. Such a retailer specific app would also provide a huge opportunity for selecting and ordering via mobile websites and paying in store with low cost payment methods. Reducing ques changing the shop into a pick up point.

Remote mobile payments are a rather confusing conception as with
future commerce it will mean anything more than a few centimetres from the card reader. As explained they offer great possibilities for new user experiences and use cases with technology and infrastructure that is already there.

Payment methods should be able to support multiple use cases
and not restrict themselves to theoretical channel restrictions. However this sets
competitive levels for the pricing off such payment facilities. This is the
challenge for PayPal and American Express as they have the open platform, consumers and payment data to facilitate this opportunity. So there are multiple mobile payment options to be rollout and no need to wait for NFC to be all around. The latest announcement from PayPal with AJB shows the major interest in the POS environment and the low effort it requires.