Near Field Communication (NFC) technology has been receiving a lot of attention recently, often in the context of enabling contactless payments. However, NFC is well suited to a host of other applications, including contactless ticketing. We expect ticketing will be an increasingly common NFC application as more smartphones and other consumer devices incorporate NFC capability as a standard feature.
The verticals in which NFC-based ticketing could have a significant impact—public transportation, air travel, and entertainment, to name several—generally have the requisite infrastructure for accepting contactless tickets already in place, which would make the transition to NFC ticketing relatively quick, easy and inexpensive. The deployment of contactless NFC ticketing would have immediate benefits in each of these verticals, including:
The impact of NFC ticketing will reach beyond those benefits it provides to deploying organizations. NFC ticketing will emerge as an alternative—and direct competitive threat—to other ticketing technologies, including mobile barcode. How will the market to respond to NFC ticketing? To be certain, only time will tell, however, we expect NFC will cause disruption in the market for mobile barcode readers.