LAS VEGAS — Call the Money2020 panel on NFC's future as theengine that will power mobile payments a divided caucus.

One panelist, Hans Reisgies, a co-founder of Sequent, anNFC-focused company based in Redwood City, Calif., was loudlybullish. When asked what the chances that NFC (Near FieldCommunication) will ultimately prevail as the standard for mobilepayments, he scored it a 5, 5 standing for a dead-on certainty.

Other panelists at Wednesday's session were more circumspect.Didier Serra, founder of INSIDE Secure, also in Redwood City and abig player in powering payments for public transit via NFC, scoredit a 2. “I don't think it will be the technology at point of sale,”he explained.

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Mohamed Awad, vice chairman of the NFC Forum, offered a hedgedprediction: “NFC will be a big part of our lives, it will grow inimportance, but it is too early to say it will be dominant.”

Part of NFC's problem, said Reisgies, is that it had beenoversold in in its early years. Proponents, he said, “claimed NFCwas the answer for everything. It isn't. But it is very good atsome things.”

Such as? Reisgies pointed to a recently announced deal betweenhis company and mobile carrier Sprint where Sprint is rolling outNFC to millions of users. “But more than half of the use cases willbe non-payment,” said Reisgies, who pointed to access controls(gaining entry to locked doors in offices and also hotels with atap of an NFC phone) and transit solutions as prime cases in point.“There are real places where consumers will use NFC.”

As for the belief that Apple's shunning of NFC to date on theiPhone has been a death sentence, Awad poo-poohed that. “Thereare many third-party options for enabling it on iPhone,” hesaid.

He added that “Android has it on many, many phones. We should bepast the point where people say NFC just isn't available on phones.It is. There are maybe 300 million NFC equipped phones outthere.”

What about the extremely slow launch of Isis, the mobile carrier-backed NFC payments initiative? SaidAwad: “Isis needs to work on tempering expectations. The bar hasbeen set too high. Isis is in fact building out a whole paymentscheme,” involving both consumers and merchants. “That will taketime.”

“If Isis succeeds it will move the whole (NFC) industryforward,” said Reisgies.

And if it doesn't? This panel did not address that pointedquestion.