Sprint aims to give NFC a shot in the arm by releasing Pinsight Touch, an open platform enabling the secure storing and accessing of credentials.
Pinsight is aimed at transit, access and payment verticals and works as a white-label solution that will slot into existing applications. Sprint has partnered with Sequent on the platform.
In conjunction with Pinsight Touch, Sprint is launching Pinsight Media+, a tools suite aimed toward boosting visibility for Pinsight-enabled apps. Sprint is also promising that Pinsight will streamline the customer adoption process by limiting it to an opt-in function within existing apps in lieu of adding additional apps or hardware as well lengthy authentication processes.
NFC appears somewhat hobbled in the wake of the iOS 7 and new iPhones launch, which again skipped the technology in favor of Bluetooth Low Energy. NFC has yet to gain an amount of traction that matched its hype as the future of mobile payments. The difficulty in finding retailers with compatible terminals, along with the fact that iPhones do not feature NFC, hasn’t helped. But Pinsight could provide a more seamless integration for developers and enable functionality outside of mobile payments.
Isis, a nationwide mobile wallet service leveraging NFC, managed to partner up all of the major U.S. carriers except for Sprint.
