‘NFC could help you make smarter spending decisions,’ says Intuit

The director of strategic mobile initiatives at Intuit has outlined the role he sees NFC taking in the company’s future products and business planning, describing the technology as “earth shaking”.

Intuit

Omar Green told ReadWriteWeb that the money management firm was ready to go when NFC use exploded in the near future, having already built hooks for NFC into its product line.

He added that the technology was not being rolled out yet, as neither the market nor the hardware was ready. But he said NFC would fit in with its core products such as Quicken, QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint.com.

Intuit’s GoPayment service — which allows business owners to accept credit card payments via a smartphone or tablet computer — has also been identified as a service which would benefit from the introduction of NFC capability.

“The challenge with getting consumers to adopt a new technology like NFC isn’t just about getting people to learn a new behaviour, but it’s something that has to make sense for them. There’s not a strong enough need for this today,” says Green, referring to replacing credit cards with NFC.

“It only takes seven seconds to pay for a transaction using a credit card. NFC wouldn’t make that process significantly faster. But it could make it smarter.

“The promise of NFC is in helping you make smarter spending decisions. Computers can help you decide when and how to spend your money, a proposition that actually ties into another Intuit property, the personal finance service and mobile app, Mint.com, whose data analysis capabilities have been helping people not just manage their money, but understand it.

“An NFC ‘card’ in a phone could provide useful information like your bank account balance immediately after making a purchase, or it could suggest which card to use before a purchase (for example, one that was giving you double points or some other incentive),” he told ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez.

Green said there was no fixed date for Intuit’s roll-out of NFC services, but added that the company was ready to go as soon as the market was ready.

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