NFC - mobile instead of money

In the summer of 2016, a short news item that few people noticed broke through the Czech media. The Czechoslovak Commercial Bank expanded payment options to include phones equipped with NFC chips.

NFC stands for Near Field Communication. It is a wireless technology that at first glance is no different from the 13.56 MHz RFID tags that all of today's contactless payment cards are equipped with. It has the same antenna, the same reading range of 10-20 cm and works with the same payment terminal - if the firmware is modified accordingly. ČSOB has taken advantage of this, so all its payment terminals can accept payments from both regular contactless payment cards and NFC tag-equipped phones.

Look for the fundamental difference between the 13.56 MHz RFID tag and the NFC tag in the little one in the middle. It looks like a poppy seed. It's called a chip. Everything else you see is just an antenna. Well, I probably shouldn't use the word "just" because the chip wouldn't work without it. It wouldn't have the energy to wake up, and it certainly wouldn't have the power to send the result of its activity out into space.
Simply put, an NFC chip is about as different from an RFID chip as a computer running MS-DOS is from a computer running 64-bit Linux. They are both computers, they both have a keyboard, a screen, a hard drive and a processor. But just as 64-bit Linux gives a computer many more capabilities than the MS-DOS architecture, there is a fundamental difference between the NFC chip's instruction set and the RFID chip's instruction set. The NFC protocol, for example, allows two-way communication. And that's the magic. This is because each NFC tag can act as a reader at the same time, if needed. This broke the physical barrier of the RFID tag, which did not have the energy needed to use advanced encryption mechanisms during data communication.

In the near future, you will no longer have a wallet full of credit and discount cards, OpenCards, Lítačka, key fobs for work, computer login cards and the like. Instead, you'll have one smartphone with one NFC tag and one app that makes it behave like any of the above.