There’s a paradox at the heart of mobile payments’ spectacular growth. On a global basis, the use of mobile devices for payments of all kinds is booming: Gartner Group projected worldwide mobile payment transactions for 2013 would total $235.4 billion, an impressive 44% increase over the previous year’s $163.1 billion. Future forecasts for mobile’s growth are equally rosy: Yankee Group now projects that the entire mobile economy will be valued at $3.1 trillion by 2017, with all mobile sectors – devices, commerce, broadband, apps and cloud – contributing to the potential earnings.
In the here and now, however, some areas continue to lag behind. One of the most stubbornly slow-growing has been Near Field Communication (NFC) payments – the contactless payment technology used to enable the many mobile wallets vying for consumer and retailer attention and adoption. Consumers are certainly using their phones, PDAs and tablets for more everyday functions, but when it comes to paying for purchases they are still reaching into their physical wallets and pulling out cash, credit and debit cards.
“Mobile wallets remain a story of high interest and low adoption, as just 16% of mobile device owners have used their phone to make an in-store payment in the past three months,” said Jordan McKee, Yankee Group Analyst, in the February 2014 report US Mobile Wallet Roundup: Gauging the Future Potential of Today’s Solutions. “More concerning, of those using mobile wallets 73% are doing so fewer than five times per month.” These low adoption rates are particularly perplexing given that Yankee Group estimates two-thirds of consumers are interested in learning more about transitioning to a mobile wallet platform.
Read more on the Verifone blog
