Analysts are projecting that mobile payments will top $1trillion within five years as the burgeoning smartphone and tablet industry continues to grow. IDC Financial Insights are predicting that 66 percent of the figure will come from mobile commerce with proximity payments, such as near field communication (NFC), making up 25 percent. P2P payments like Bitcoin will have cornered 7 percent of the matket whereas barcode-based will be worth just 2 percent of the global market.
Aaron McPherson, practice director, worldwide payment strategies, IDC, commented: “The growing prevalence of smartphones is enabling a variety of mobile payment methods, which combined are becoming a significant share of global commerce. We expect growth rates to continue to accelerate as consumers and retailers become more comfortable with the technology.”
There is a word of caution from IDC regarding the fact that mobile payments will still only by 2.5 percent of the global worldwide commerce total. That shouldn’t put anyone off though as it simply means there’s a lot more space for growth. As device adoption spreads further across the globe the number will increase and could even see the mobile payments market top $1tn before the five-year mark.
Mobile is an integral part of the online gambling industry and looking at certain company results just goes to confirm how important it is. One of the grumbles from players is that payments sometimes take too long and an increase in the breadth of methods widely available could put pay to some of the lingering worries that exist with some gamblers.
Take Bitcoin. The payment method hasn’t seen widespread adoption as of yet thanks to associations with, amongst other things, the ‘black market eBay’. Once it has shed this kind of tag it could be huge in all industries and the 7 percent of the market that could belong to the P2P mobile payments would be even higher.
The same could be said for proximity payments like NFC. We’ve written extensively on CalvinAyre.com about how this could be used by online gambling companies to their advantage by speeding up the process of topping up an account – something that no one likes to wait for. The amounts NFC can process might be small, however, for those customers that like to top up small amounts at a time the benefits would be large.
It’s no surprise that heady predictions like those here are being made and as long as mobile penetration continues unfettered the estimates may even be a little too cautious.
