I am anxious for the time when I can buy groceries or pay for a meal with my iPhone.  According to Juniper Research, that time may be be closer than you would think.

As reported by GigaOM, Juniper Research predicts that 1 in 5 Smartphones Will Have NFC by 2014.  NFC, or “Near Field Communication,” is a technology that allows a payment to be made by holding a device, such as a mobile phone, in close proximity to a NFC-capable point of sale terminal.

I think it would be great to use a mobile wallet on my iPhone, working in concert with an NFC chip embedded within my iPhone, to make a payment.

The GigaOM article states:

Juniper said the increasing momentum behind NFC, with a stream of vendor and carriers announcements in recent months, is helping boost the prospects of NFC. North America will lead the way, according to Juniper, with half of all NFC smartphones by 2014. France, in particular, is off to a quick start, with 1 million NFC devices expected this year.

Of course, there is more than just putting moble wallet apps and NFC chips on smartphones.

But the NFC ramp-up will still faces challenges. With so many players involved, from merchants, operators, manufacturers and web giants like Google, service complexity will be an issue. The industry also needs to work out business models around NFC while ensuring strong security for consumers unfamiliar with the concept of a mobile wallet, said Howard Wilcox, the author of the report.

Which smart phone vendor will be first to the races with a mainstream NFC-equipped device? Will the next iPhone be NFC-equipped?  I hope so, but I had also hoped for that in the iPhone 4.  Time will tell.  I’m just hoping for sooner, rather than later.

And, by the way, Identity Management and Information Security are crucial to an overall solution. Knowing who the user is and that user wants to do, and making sure their information is absolutely safe, are critical components of the mobile payments infrastructure that must be built. In that vein, its great to be in the industry that is making this all happen.

Yesterday, in an interesting article yesterday for ReadWriteWeb, Mike Melanson wrote about increased industry cooperation in mobile payments:

Bank of America has started working with Visa to begin testing the use of smartphones to make in-store payments without the need for cash or credit cards. The system will make use of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, which is a short-range communication technology for mobile phones, to make payments as simple as waving your phone at another NFC-enabled device.

Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb reported earlier in the week that:

Apple has just hired Benjamin Vigier, an expert in the field of near-field communications, as its new product manager for mobile commerce, reports NearFieldCommunicationsWorld.com, a trade publication for NFC-based products.

A couple of my colleagues at Sun Microsystems had predicted that the iPhone 4 would include NFC capability.  They were premature, but I hope the next iPhone version is NFC enabled, because I really like the idea of mobile payments, and by then, my 3GS iPhone will be due for replacement.  We’ll see …