I have been following with rapt attention the enthusiasm about NFC and mobile payments.  As an early participant in the build out of the NFC ecosystem and currently a payments consultant, I’m in a position to see both the unequivocal positives of NFC mobile payments technology, and the complexity it will take to build it out. Any serious payment pro knows that change in this market takes time.  Consumers will adjust behavior, but over long periods of time.  Even the best innovations (and NFC is probably in that class) take many years to displace people’s habits.

Numerous reports have been released about the iPad 2, the iPhone 5 and the inevitablity of NFC and the wonders of mobile payments all that will bring.  On Wall Street, expectations like these can be devastating when companies fail to live up. While I”m not worried about Apple’s future, and certainly not their stock price, what about NFC?  What if the iPad 2 does not come out with NFC this coming Wednesday?  Have the pundits pushed up the NFC expectations so high that there’s going to be a crash in expectations?

The truth is that no one outside of Apple really knows if there will be NFC (or anything else) in the new iPad 2.  When Apple rolls out an NFC system, as I believe they ultimately will, it’s bound to change things substantially.  Is it realistic to think they could make such a big announcement without any tangible evidence a couple days ahead of time?  Maybe so, but it seems hard to imagine.  We’ll know if the iPad 2 has NFC soon.  But if it doesn’t have NFC, what will happen to the NFC market?

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