According to the Financial Times, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt said he believes a third of check-out terminals in retail stores and restaurants will be upgraded to allow near field communications (NFC) mobile payments within the next year. Schmidt was appearing at the Cannes Lion advertising festival. Schmidt said that number represents a sufficient quantity for wide adoption of mobile payments.
“That money (to convert terminals) is going to be spent not by Google and not by the phone guys but by the credit card companies, because the fraud rates are so much lower,” Schmidt said in the article. “Nobody knows how quickly this will occur but it’s in their interests to convert as fast as they humanly can.”
Schmidt said he could not predict how quickly adoption of mobile payments using NFC will take, but calling it an educated guess, Schmidt said, “How long does it take an infrastructure player to upgrade a significant percentage of their infrastructure – it’s on the order of a year, it’s not a week, it’s not a month but it’s also not five years…”
Schmidt went on to predict that mobile advertising and payments will be a trillion dollar industry.
