If you look around in 2025 everyone is talking about how cash is disappearing and everyone is wanting to preserve cash, but what’s driving the shift to digital?
You only need to look at the electronics market to understand the drivers. This article about how half of Irelands contactless payments were made via NFC is particularly relevant. NFC readers have been widely adopted in smartphones and they are used to connect the smartphone to a payment device and make this more accessible.
All smartphones, except budget smartphones contain NFC readers, so much so that restaurants have most recently started using the technology for “tap and order” to allow people sitting at their table to order the food to see the menu on their smartphone to place their order to the table. This is a very smooth use of the technology and it shows that is being widely understood and adopted.
The technology was first used for payment by Barclaycard in 2007 and late in 2015 Apple launched Apple Pay in the UK. Like with all technology when the transactions are involved the technology gets adopted and this has picked up pace year on year through last decade and in to this one showing year on year growth. The growth in microchip manufacture is set to go from 3.4 billion dollars during 2024 to 7.8 billion dollars expected in 2029.
The growth in this market demonstrates how widely NFC technology is expected to grow and the chips are likely to be in many applications in part of our daily lives. You tap and your device reads the chip inside the other device as part of the Internet of Things.
The boom in NFC technology and its widespread adoption means everyone has an NFC reader on their person, that’s right its your smartphone. The adoption of convenience for payment via a smart phone means that everyone paying this way and using their smartphone in this way for tapping and paying are walking around with NFC readers to scan and tap everything and anything.
The main applications for NFC chips currently are:
- Smart home automation
- Digital Business Cards
- Sensing technologies
- Access control
- Mobile payments
There are many upcoming applications for the technology that are being developed relating to customer experience, brand protection and asset protection not to mention the technology being developed further by engineers to provide new features.
What is clear is the NFC expenditure is going up and the technology is in peoples pockets so the world of tapping and experiencing is going to continue to develop as the engineers further develop the core technology allowing it to do more and more.
Digital Stationery has started it’s NFC journey with a range of review cards available to help you get more onboard with the technology so you can acquire reviews from your existing customers to boost your online visibility and recognition.
As we make more products available, you will be able to expand what you can do in more places by ordering some of our NFC Products.