I think NFC is a wee bit off, assuming you are talking about NFC based phones. You will see contactless based cards rolling out in a number of regions soon, ie the UK is "launching" (Visa/MasterCards term for pilot) contactless payments in London in 2 months time. You probably won't see any traction on that till early next year.
The contactless card readers should read NFC phones as they use the same transmission technology. Therefore you should have a reasonable infrastructure setup to use NFC. You will then need the phone manufacturers to start rolling out phone (I have heard some fairly big numbers bandied about, ie > 1m NFC phones in Europe next year) but then there is the issue of whether it is the phone companies that back the applications or whether it continues to be the card schemes (Visa/MasterCard).
In all of the above, I'm still struggling for Keycorp to have a meaningful role on a global basis in all of this. The reality is that their terminals are niche and they won't be able to compete with VeriFone or Ingenico at the big end of town and I sincerely doubt they will be able to compete with the Chinese at the low end of town (Blue Bamboo, Castles (technically a Taiwanese company) etc). So do they play in the card market? I would be surprised to see large global success there. The Multos aspect of the business for me is probably the most interesting as it could be industry leading (the rest of the business is industry trailing). But we haven't seen a big take-up of multi-application cards globally (don't start on me with the ANZ card).
Sorry if this is all negative on Keycorp, it could be a bit of lack of understanding but I think their current review highlights they aren't travelling too well.
KYC Price at posting:
0.0¢ Sentiment: ST Sell Disclosure: Not Held
