The celebration of the NFC Forum’s 20th anniversary marks a key milestone for an organisation founded as community led to define standards and ensure maximum implementation of NFC technology.
The organisation is well positioned to take advantage of growth said Mike McCamon, Executive Director of the NFC Forum, with one example being supporting the Digital Product Passport legislation launched by the EU, where information on a product’s origin will need to be easily accessed by consumers.
“The biggest success of the NFC Forum and the community is making contactless payment mainstream using your mobile handset,” said McCamon. “It’s [been] no small task … announcing a chip and then getting people to implement it to a place where more than half of people use the technology is an incredibly difficult undertaking.”
In comparing the early days of Bluetooth which was met with skepticism to today, an arguably ubiquitous technology, the NFC Forum are looking at extending use cases out of payment to access control, IoT provisioning, and digital keys.
“The biggest success is what we call card emulation mode on the phone,” explained McCamon. “NFC technology has several different modes of operation: one is card emulation mode … we also have our wireless power mode, which allows us to harvest power over the connection … then the last big feature is called reader mode, which allows me to use my phone to read things and tags.”
This last feature is where NFC anticipates the most growth, “because what will happen is people will start to use this as a payment terminal … we see this as being big around Digital Product Passports.”
NFC technology for the Digital Product Passport
Digital Product Passport (DPP) is a regulation currently being brought in by the EU, which will require every product placed on the EU market to have clear and easy to access information on its entire lifecycle, as part of a wider initiative to promote sustainability by providing consumers with the information they need to make a decision on what they would like to purchase.
“The idea is that the Cloud is the current concept [for storing the information] and how we enter into this conversation is as a data carrier,” said McCamon. “How do we connect the product to the Cloud?
“A lot of initial work people are doing is using QR codes, and we think there are some problems with that. The first is if you put it on a care tag, you’ll probably throw away the care tag and not have any connection to the Cloud. We also know that most manufacturers are never going to put a QR code on the exterior of a product.”
Therefore, the question for NFC was how they could use their technology to support the DPP regulation. Being that NFC technology is already integrated into smartphones, leaning on existing infrastructure provides enormous benefits.
“Most companies that have NFC already built into their products will only need a software update to be compliant to the regulation,” stressed McCamon. “This is massive. If you’re an IoT vendor, if you’re a company that’s selling products and trying to comply with regulation … it’s hard to change the hardware …. We expect this to increase the adoption of DPP in electronics in a very rapid way.”
For this reason, NFC lends itself well to the provisioning of IoT products – something McCamon said he didn’t see happening much at the moment, but it made sense. In one example, a company that manufactures padlocks could use the power harvesting and authentication capabilities of NFC, to hold a phone up to a padlock, powering it and then authenticating that user can unlock it.
“I’ve talked to some lock manufacturers that are looking at reducing their bill of materials cost by getting rid of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and just having it be NFC,” added McCamon.
The Forum is also working on a specification that McCamon couldn’t provide too much information on – but it will improve NFC functionality for DPP by making sure it works more reliably and allows the user to store the DPP on the product in addition to the Cloud.
“Our DPP specification is going to allow you to read dynamic data from the product as well,” added McCamon, citing an example of purchasing an e-bike battery and needing to know information such as the age of the battery and how much charge it has left.
Future initiatives
Other initiatives the organisation is working on include extending the range of the connection from five millimetres to two centimetres, something that McCamon noted “isn’t going to allow you to tap across the room,” but to be less precise with tapping; and multi-purpose tap, which is looking at making “more than one thing happen over one tap”, such as paying for a purchase and using a loyalty card.
“We’re inherently a member-contributed organisation, so if the members don’t want it, if the community doesn’t want it, it doesn’t happen,” concluded McCamon. “Everything that’s happening right now is organic in our community of people saying, ‘hey we’d like to explore this idea or this new feature,’ to take advantage of the technology that we already use.”
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