Today's podcast feature takes a look at mobile financial services, from the current state of mobile payments to NFC adoption and the developments we're likely to see next year.

Joining us are Winston Yeo, Vice President Marketing and Product Management for Mobile Financial Services at Gemalto, and Amol Deshmukh, Gemalto's Director of Mobile Financial Services for North America.

Mark Bridge writes:

We started last week with a 20th birthday party for the SMS text message, which was first used as an alternative Christmas card by Neil Papworth in 1992. Since then, mobile data has been transformed from the familiar dit-dit-dit dah-dah dit-dit-dit of Nokia phones to non-stop internet connectivity on smart devices.

Juniper Research has revised its forecasts for the worldwide NFC market, lowering its estimates for NFC growth in North America and Western Europe.

It says Apple’s decision not to include NFC technology in its iPhone 5 has reduced the confidence of brands and retailers, which means we’ll see fewer NFC marketing campaigns and less interest in rolling out new Point of Sale equipment.

Mark Bridge writes:

It’s time to ‘ketchup’ with last week’s biggest mobile industry news stories - and where better to start than with HP’s claims of ‘saucy’ behaviour?  It’s launched an investigation into last year’s acquisition of UK company Autonomy, claiming the software company had ‘spiced up’ its valuation. Condiment-based puns aside, it’s a serious matter that could see key players from the deal charged with cooking the books.

ABI Research says 2013 will see NFC leaving its ‘trial phase’, with 285 million NFC-enabled devices expected to be shipped worldwide.

That figure will have increased almost seven-fold by 2017, when a total of 1.95 billion NFC devices are forecast to be shipped.