Oracle is throwing cold water on the supposed impending Near Field Communication-driven mobile payments revolution at the point of sale.
The Silicon Valley giant just finished proof-of-concept trials on mobile phones embedded with NFC technology, and found the performance too slow to be workable as an instant enabler of contactless point-of-sale payments.
Oracle’s second guess is a relatively rare challenge to the actual utility of NFC itself. The amount of prognostication on the potential of NFC and contactless payments almost equals the actual volume of payments, but most of the predictions have been size-of-market assessments focused on when embedded phones will become mainstream, and how popular they will be with users.
The Oracle finding is based on the requirement of NFC payments to perform multiple look-ups of transaction-related data, which Oracle says slows the speed of the transaction to a level similar to that of a swipe card. That would spoil the speedy execution case for NFC.
David Dorf, a senior director at Oracle, said the experiments with NFC found it time required to open each of the three files to read content representing loyalty, coupons and payment-taking came to about two seconds per file. While combining data from all three files into one would speed things up, Dorf said that data in each of the three files usually is owned by three different organizations, making such an integration unlikely.
