Little-known fact: NFC payments already work in India. On most card machines. That means that Apple Pay already works in India, and cards with the NFC icon can already be used on most card payment terminals in India. In my experience, all merchants, from major supermarkets in New Delhi to fruit stores in Coimbatore have Point-of-sale machines that support NFC payments. But there is just one little problem: merchants usually don't know how to operate them, and customers usually don't have an NFC-enabled payment option. So chip and PIN it usually is. "Around 50k POS terminals have been enabled for NFC acceptance across [our] merchant network," a spokesperson for Pine Labs, one of India's largest deployers of POS machines told MediaNama. For context, that's one-fourth of the number of ATMs in India. And that's just one deployer. Ingenico, another payments company, told MediaNama that over half of the POS machines it has ever sold are NFC-enabled. As of last October, Pine was seeing a 10% month-on-month increase in NFC payments, even as the overall number of these payments was low. What you need for NFC payments You need either i) a payment app like Samsung Pay or ICICI Pockets, and a phone that supports NFC payments, or ii) a credit or debit card that supports NFC. If your card is new, chances are your card supports NFC. Just look out for the NFC icon on the back. If you don't have an NFC-enabled card, you can search Google for "[bank name] Visa PayWave OR MasterCard Tap-and-Go"…
