Magic Money

I’ve always been fascinated about digital payments and interactions. Then I stumbled upon something called as Near-field communication also abbreviated as NFC. In layman’s term, NFC helps in transferring small amounts of data from one device to another quick and swiftly when in close proximity. But unfortunately, no common man knew about it. But they are to be found in almost every other plastic card we use to pay or to gain access to.

If u were to find a horizontal Wi-Fi logo on your credit/debit card, your gym door access card, your office entry card it simply means that all those works with the help of NFC. All these cards can just be tapped on the respective terminal to either pay or to gain access to something. Most commonly credit/debit cards also called as “contactless/ tap-to-pay cards” works with NFC. In our case, even Chennai Metro Rail’s travel card is powered by NFC.

Ok, if you guys know all this and ask me what’s new about this? This is where NFC integration comes in. Countries like China, U.K, U.S.A, Germany and some other first world countries have been working on integrating these NFC powered cards with phones for almost 2 decades now.

China being the leader, they have NFC powered interactions almost everywhere. For example, people in China can simply add their payments card, gym and office access cards and even transport cards to their fitness band digitally. This allows them to simply tap their fitness band on the card swiping machine (POS) to pay for anything, or can tap on the door to enter their gym, offices etc. Similarly, even Apple has Apple pay in their ecosystem of devices enabling to just add their cards to either their phones or apple watches.

Now cut to India, we don’t have anything of that sort here, Apple doesn’t support apple pay here and so do others. Thanks to Samsung’s Pay and Google’s Gpay, they have been slowly building these for the people of India for quite sometime now. Anyone right now with an NFC enabled phone can add their credit/debit cards to any of these two apps and just tap your phone on the POS to pay for it. For those who haven’t registered for Gpay yet, here please use my referral code (z0s73u) so that I get free money, jus kidding (but please do tho).

Additionally, apps like “Cards-Mobile wallet”, “SBI card”, “ICICI Pockets” also support Tap to pay NFC features via your android phone. I have no clue about the other so called “SSHHMOOTH” OS, all the mentioned features are tested only on android devices. “Cards-Mobile wallet” app enables you to add any NFC powered card to your phone and does not restrict you to payment cards.

Now all you have to do is just add all your cards to your phone and leave your wallet at home. For those who ask why not UPI? you don’t need the internet and neither does this take all those time for opening and entering the payment details on your phone, just unlock your phone, switch on NFC and Tap-to-pay.