Crowd Cast president Takashi Hoshikawa updated his Japan Cashless map introduced back in January, the cacophony of QR Code payment platforms continues to grow. Just like any gold rush, QR will crash and burn at some point. Big players will gobble up the smaller ones and things will settle down.
But something else is going on. There’s a small but important difference, so small that Takashi Hoshikawa is not aware of it: he labeled the FeliCa section in the upper left corner as NFC.
This is the result of using Apple Pay on a global NFC iPhone where all the necessary hardware and software is seamlessly unified. The old plastic card mentality of different walled off technologies: contactless credit card (EMV), transit card (FeliCa, MIFARE), ID card (ISO 7816), NFC A/B or F, etc. slips away and becomes one seamless NFC Wallet in the mind. This mindset is also on display in SearchMan co-founder Naoki Shibata’s recent article on Rakuten Pay Suica: no mention of FeliCa anymore, it’s just one NFC thing.
This is an important and natural, but quiet progression that will accelerate with the enhanced NFC support in iOS 13 and expansion of new services like Apple Pay Octopus. iOS 13 Apple Pay Wallet will set the standard for global NFC that just works, a standard that Google Pay will struggle to match because of Android hardware fragmentation.
Players that leverage the advantages of global NFC and offer new services based on them, like JR East (Inbound Apple Pay Suica), and Mastercard (NFC switching dual mode bank card services) will gain, while companies that stick with the old ‘one thing’ contactless plastic card mentality, like Visa, will lose. It’s that simple.
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