Could Android's NFC Become Indonesia's e-Payment Solution?

Google's Android handsets have been growing in popularity in Indonesia, just like in other countries where they can get a smartphone with relatively lower price compared to the iPhone. And to make things interesting, last year Eric Schmidt announced Android Gingerbread's support for NFC (Near Field Communication) and of course payment is most likely to be the main usage. In Indonesia, e-payment has been always an issue with almost no e-payment solution working properly. The reason? The users simply have no interest of using e-payment solution and quite happy with manual bank transfer which might be caused by the lack of service that's easy enough for common user to use, e-payment requires to much hassle compared to e-banking or m-banking. But of course, this can be easily disrupted. Looking the increasing trend of Android phones in Indonesia, it seems that Android is going to be the leading platform in 3-4 years, maybe less. And combining with the fact that Android has been pushing its NFC support, it's a big possibility that Android NFC will gain popularity among Indonesians as an e-payment solution. The trend of growing Android phones in Indonesia, the increasing behavior of buying stuff online and the insanely huge penetration for smartphones in Indonesia seems like a perfect fit. For the last few years credit card penetration in Indonesia is still very low, which is the reason on why credit card-based payment platform is not popular in Indonesia. But with the increasing economic strength and consumer buying power, I think e-payment platform will also grow immensely in the next few years regardless the low number of credit cards in-use. Debit card may still be dominant, but mobile e-payment solution is almost inevitable. Android growing, smartphones dominating, mobile internet increasing, combined with surging buying power, Android's NFC Payment solution could gain significant popularity in Indonesia. For all I know, Indonesia could be the next big market for internet and mobile services. Or maybe I'm just biased ;-)