Contactless technology and the iGaming industry

Eric Bianchi
March 28, 2011
3 Comments

Near Field Communication in action Technology that has been championed by London Underground for years is set to revolutionize our everyday lives a lot more than just providing the technology to get Londoners from A to B every day.

Near Field Communication (NFC) has already showed its ease of use and the fact that it rarely suffers from problems. Coffee chain Starbucks have recently begun using the technology in their loyalty cards so that they can easily keep track of their customer base and it’s already used by a number of credit card companies. Realistically, it could mean that a coffee chain would now become a valuable affiliate for a gaming company and vice versa.

The next development for the technology could have an even more profound effect on the online gambling industry, especially if the technology becomes widely available on home computers and mobile smart phones.

You’d only have to have an NFC reader attached to your computer and it would open up a wealth of exciting new opportunities for the user. Imagine logging into your gambling site of choice and being able to simply touch your payment card onto the NFC reader to deposit and then being able to do the same to receive the funds from your online gambling account.

It will perhaps be even more of an important development when you think of it in terms of the chips being incorporated into mobile devices.

One smart phone that was released last year, Google’s Nexus S, has the technology on board and it’s not likely to be long until the other smart phone manufacturers start to offer the same deal.

If you combine this with the fact that the mobile gambling market is currently experiencing off-the-scale growth then the presence of them in a mobile device would be very beneficial for the iGaming industry.

You could visit a site such as Bodog and simply touch your payment card to the back of your smart phone to put money in and out of your account, much like we mentioned about the home desktop, and you’d need nothing else…well maybe a nose for the right bets but that’s it.

It’s obviously very early stages for the technology in terms of the online gambling industry. It’s all well and good them adding NFC to mobile devices but whether the government will allow certain sites to use it is another thing altogether.

Some may call it the death of the wallet and that it could be but the chance to only have to take out one device with which to live your life is something that is a very significant development.

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