PayPal On Barriers To Google Wallet: Mass Adoption Of NFC Is Years Away – TechCrunch

As you may have read, Google officially launched its mobile payments platform Google Wallet recently, which allows you to pay for products in the real world by tapping your NFC-enabled Android phone against a compatible card reader. Shortly following the initial announcement of the technology in May, payments giant PayPal went on the offensive, filing a lawsuit against Google and two former PayPal executives who now are in charge of mobile payments at Google. Allegations of “misappropriation of trade secrets, and “breach of fiduciary duty” were thrown out against these individuals. Clearly, it’s messy. While the lawsuit itself spoke volumes about PayPal’s view on Google Wallet, the eBay-owned company has not really commented on Google Wallet over the past few months. Until now.

We sat down with PayPal’s director of communications, Anuj Nayar, who candidly gave me the company’s opinions on Google Wallet and NFC technologies. We know that eBay and PayPal have a somewhat interesting view on NFC technology. In a recent earnings call, eBay CEO John jokingly said merchants refer NFC “not for commerce.” But PayPal has dipped its toes in the NFC pool with support for Android, which Nayar explains as ‘keeping an eye’ on the technology.

Nayar says that one advantage he sees with PayPal’s payments platform vs. Google Wallet is that “we’re not asking anyone to do anything different.” He points to the fact that in order to use NFC right now, many consumers would have to change phones to the NFC-enabled Nexus S. “There simply aren’t that many NFC enabled phones out there and we don’t see NFC as something that will happen very quickly,” he explains.

Another challenge to the adoption Google Wallet’s platform and NFC, says Nayar, is trying to get merchants to change their behavior. As my colleague Greg Kumparak wrote in his review of Google Wallet,

via PayPal On Barriers To Google Wallet: Mass Adoption Of NFC Is Years Away – TechCrunch.