Whether it’s through tapping-to-pay, swiping a card through a reader, or inserting a chip, card-based payment methods have become a staple of making everyday purchases. For years, it seemed as if such payment methods, which have largely replaced cash, could go no further; from a layperson’s point of view, what could be more convenient than paying for groceries or gas by simply tapping their card on a screen?

Mobile wallets represent a notable development in this regard, taking the interaction further by maintaining the motion but replacing the object through digitization. Today, people are able to load multiple debit, credit, and even gift cards onto devices like their smartphones or smartwatches so they can be accessed as needed, all without needing to carry around the cards themselves.

While mobile wallets have by no means invalidated standard cards, they serve as an important addition to available payment methods that could simultaneously complicate and correct some aspects of the existing payment experience.

The Advent of Mobile NFC Interfaces

Mobile NFC, or near-field communication, is the technology that allows phones and wearables to communicate with other devices also equipped with NFC. NFC can be understood as a direct upgrade to radio-frequency identification (RFID), a tool often used for items like security cards, keychain fobs, and other tools used to unlock objects.

Importantly, NFC is the technology that makes mobile wallets feasible, allowing certain devices to transmit payment information to others over short distances. This is partially due to the fact that, unlike Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, NFC doesn’t require users to manage processes like manual pairing or device discovery; instead, all users have to do is place an NFC-enabled device within a few inches of another for the two to begin communicating with one another, making for a relatively seamless experience.

Beyond its convenience, NFC is also notable for its security and privacy. Not only does the technology allow users to forgo carrying physical cards around with them, reducing the likelihood they could be lost or stolen, it can also be used alongside authentication features like passwords and biometric scans. Mobile wallets tend to have additional security measures in place, namely data encryption to reduce the likelihood of digital theft.

Experimenting with NFC: EmberPay’s Case Study

As time has gone on, companies have gotten increasingly creative with mobile NFC interfaces, making the technology more versatile outside of direct payment methods like mobile wallets. For example, like with RFID, NFC is being used in security applications. In practice, this means users can load digital keys onto their devices, again reducing the need to keep track of their physical counterparts.

Meanwhile, some companies, such as the card issuer EmberPay, founded by Josh Steiner, Charlie Baker, and Micah Thomas, are experimenting with using chats instead of debit or credit cards to make payments, particularly when those payments are split among multiple people. Though there are already several existing split-payment tools, many of them function more as a means of reimbursement than a means of paying in-store. In other words, they make one person pay and provide them a tool to have their friends reimburse them afterwards.

According to the company, EmberPay is unique in that it has all paying members of a group pay together at the register, an approach the company states is intended to help users save time and make it easier to split what could be perceived as trivial payments.

Steiner describes the core mechanic plainly: “We’ve abstracted the payment instrument and elevated chats to be the selectable object at the point of sale. So basically, we’ve enabled people to pay for things with chats rather than a debit or credit card.”

In initial testing, the company placed 50 college students in working coffee shops and restaurants and timed them completing split transactions on both a popular payment app and EmberPay under real payment conditions.

On the popular payment app, the sequence is familiar to anyone who has been through it. One person pays, works out what each person owes, opens a messaging app, sends a request, and waits for the other person to open the app and complete the payment. Per the company, that chain averaged 30 seconds. On EmberPay, the

same outcome took 3 seconds. The more consequential number came from a separate question: at what point does a transaction feel too small to bother splitting?

Thomas had surveyed around 500 college students before the pilot to establish a baseline, and what he found shaped how the team thought about the product’s real competition. “We were able to find that when people weren’t being paid back, it was mainly because they were too shy, or felt it too awkward to ask their friends for reimbursement,” he says. “The average amount someone would be willing to request was $12. Anything below that amount, people would rather take the hit than send a request.”

EmberPay’s chat interface aims to remove a layer of financial anxiety that the company encountered when testing an earlier architectural approach. An original version of the product issued joint cards directly to groups of friends, but user research revealed that the implied risk of a shared financial instrument, regardless of how it was structured, produced psychological resistance that no amount of explanation could overcome.

Replacing the card with a chat thread, an object users already maintain comfortably with anyone they might want to pay with, seeks to solve the problem not by reducing risk but by removing the thing that triggered the perception of it.

On the popular payment app, the pilot confirmed a floor of $24 before participants would split at all. On EmberPay, that floor dropped to $4, meaning users were willing to split a single item, a transaction the popular payment app flow made economically irrational to pursue. According to EmberPay, a six-fold reduction in minimum split threshold can be considered a behavioral shift, opening up a category of everyday transactions the existing flow had effectively closed off.

EmberPay’s case study is just one example of what appears to be a broader effort toward addressing the unique challenges of making group payments at the point of sale using mobile wallets and NFC.

Baker, the company’s CTO, puts it directly: “NFC lets me save people time by auto-populating all the trivial information—what, where, when, and how much—onto their phones for them, so they can focus their attention on just who owes them money.”

Limitations and Future Considerations

Although experiments with novel applications of NFC and mobile wallet technology seem to show some promise, it’s important to keep in mind that these applications are still in the early phases of testing and still have some obstacles to address.

Beyond the fact that NFC technology itself is still being worked on, processes like paying for goods as a group using a chat function will demand certain privacy, consent, and consumer-protection considerations to keep pace with existing payment apps and mobile wallets.

Options Abound: The Development of Third-Party Wallets

In a relatively brief period of time, payment options have gone from the classic “debit or credit” dichotomy to an increasingly wider variety of mobile wallets created by major technology companies and third-party developers alike.

While mobile wallets made by companies such as Apple or Google will likely remain mainstays for mobile wallet users for some time to come, the same cannot necessarily be said for those made by smaller businesses. Of course, third-party developers sometimes have the advantages of creativity and agility, meaning people could very well see specific payment solutions for specific payment issues on the market fairly soon.

With this potential barrage of new mobile wallet options will come a need for careful discernment, not just in terms of policies concerning security and privacy, but also in terms of how those third-party wallets will actually make use of what NFC has to offer, limitations and all. Mobile wallets have the potential to give users more payment options beyond debit or credit cards, and companies like EmberPay suggest that the more compelling opportunities may lie not in replicating the card digitally, but in rethinking what the payment object can be in the first place.

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