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Expect more point-of-sale terminals equipped with near-field communication capability over the next four years as the market is forecasted to grow at a 15.6% compound annual growth rate through 2022, says Berg Insight, a Sweden-based research firm.
By the end of 2017, POS terminal makers had shipped an estimated 24.7 million units globally. In North America, 88% of all POS terminals shipped had NFC capability, Berg Insight says in its latest “POS Terminals and Wireless M2M” report released Tuesday.
Berg Insight forecasts that the installed base of 54.5 million units of NFC-ready POS terminals globally will increase to 112.3 million by 2022. The percentage of such NFC-ready devices will increase from 50% now to 78% in four years.
In North America, Johan Fagerberg, the report author and cofounder of Berg Insight, says total POS terminal shipments will increase from 3.9 million in 2017 to 4.1 million by 2022. He expects NFC to be part of almost all POS terminals in four years, with NFC-ready POS terminal shipments increasing from 3.4 million in 2017 to 4.1 million in 2022.
As a two-way communication protocol, NFC is essential to many mobile-payments services and to contactless credit and debit cards. While POS terminals may ship with NFC, not all have the capability activated, but Berg Insight suggests that may be changing.
“Berg Insight estimates that approximately 30 million POS terminals accepted contactless payments with Visa payWave, MasterCard PayPass, or UnionPay Quickpass at the end of 2017,” a Berg Insight press release says.
Some international markets have experienced greater adoption of contactless payments than the United States has to date. In the United Kingdom, for example, 78% of debit cards and 62% of credit cards were contactless as of Dec. 31.
Aiding that adoption may be the increasing use of consumer devices, such as smart phones and tablets, as mobile POS terminals, Fagerberg says. “The mPOS terminal market is growing faster than the traditional POS terminal segment and there are more than 70 vendors active on the global market today,” he says in a press release.
The attach rate for NFC in the mobile POS segment reached 53% in 2017 on shipments of 9.7 million units. The attach rate is the percentage of devices featuring NFC. By 2022, 85% of such devices will ship with NFC capability, the firm predicts.
