Could NFC or near field communication be heading to the iPhone 5? Apple has just announced that Benjamin Vigier, a renowned NFC guru has been hired as product manager for mobile commerce. But what is NFC and why should we care?

In a nutshell, NFC is a tiny chip within a mobile device which allows us to pay for small purchases (say, under a tenner) by simply waving our mobile phone in the general direction of a NFC reader. Payments are instant and secure and mean that the days of digging around in our pockets for change whilst at the bar could effectively be at an end. No more shrapnel at the end of a night out, no more holes in pockets, no more coins down the side of the sofa.

NFC is not new, boffins at the Dutch semiconductor company NXP had the standard approved in 2003. Barclaycard users will be familiar with it through the innovative Visa payWave on certain credit cards. However it hasn’t taken off on mobile phones as planned, largely because the big players in the industry haven’t reached a consensus on how to deploy the technology.

Could Apple now lead the way and finally extend the benefits of this pretty cool technology to the rest of us?