NEAR FIELD COMMUNICATIONS

Potential Benefits and Drawbacks to the Adoption of NFC (Near Field Communications)



Potential Benefits and Drawbacks to the Adoption of NFC (Near Field Communications)

Purpose

The empirical study that has been conducted attempts to answer the question: will consumers adopt NFC based mobile payment in UK? The motivation for answering such question is the recent growth in smartphone sales and the development of NFC based techNology. Along with these facts there has been established collaboration between MNO s, FSP s and other important players to implement an NFC based mobile payment method that is standardized throughout UK.

Questionnaire design

The survey went on for a period of three weeks with total respondents of 30. Overall the survey provided useful insight on how consumers use their mobile phones and what their perception of NFC based mobile payment is, but it must be mentioned that the second part of the survey is heavily influenced by the fact that no one has practical experience with the technology. Many have answered, “Don't know” on the different attributes of NFC (Rackley 2008, 26).

The survey was directly related to NFC based mobile payment. Respondents had to answer, based on a likert scale, how they felt about NFC based mobile payment. Even though a scenario description was put forward it is still difficult to answer question about reliability, security, ease of use and more when respondents have no practical experience with NFC based mobile payment. An alternative could have been to create focus group and try out the technology in a role playing setting, but since there are no real NFC based mobile payment in UK yet it would have been inadequate to do that, but maybe in a future study that might be valuable to attempt in terms of consumer adoption. Further the survey was about adoption of NFC based mobile payment. Here questions were asked, also on a likert scale, of how quick adaptors the respondents are (Hedman 2010, 35).

Sampling method

The random sampling method was used. The primary data was collected in a quantitative sense through a survey that was distributed on Facebook. The reason why a quantitative approach is preferred is because at this stage no NFC based mobile payment method exists in UK and thus a qualitative would then have been inefficient. Also the aim of this thesis is to figure out whether NFC based mobile payment will be adopted on a national plan making it difficult to only rely on a qualitative study. The reasoning behind this is of course the level of spread a quantitative research method gives. The survey went on for a period of three weeks with total respondents of 30 (Kim 2010, 30).

Limitations

Although this research has reached its aims there have been some limitations that could not be avoided. One limitation is the sample size of the survey conducted. Due to lack of resources a sample size of 30 is acceptable for a thesis, but not a representation for a whole population. Because of the scope of the thesis the ...