5 Mobile Payments Data Points That Will Blow Your Mind

May 24, 2013 Leave a comment

5 Mobile Payments Data Points That Will Blow Your Mind

Josh Luger | May 22, 2013, 12:56 PM | 1,376 | 1

Consumers gravitate to convenience. That’s as true with payment technologies as it is with anything else. A prime example is the decades-old trend away from cash or checks and toward credit cards. Now, the mass adoption of smartphones and tablets has set the stage for a new move — away from fixed-point, card-based transactions and toward those completed on mobile. The old dream of the “digital wallet” is coming true in a very particular mobile-led fashion. In a recent report from BI Intelligence,  we explain the main types of mobile payments, analyze the state of the mobile payments race, examine the matchup between card readers and near-field communications (NFC), look at how traditional banks, credit card companies, and card processors are responding to the mobile payments threat, and detail who is furthest along in developing the all-in-one solution for merchants and consumers.

Here are 5 data points that help underscore the explosion:

$640 million: eMarketer has estimated mobile payments as adding up to $640 million in transaction volume in the U.S., up from $170 million in 2011. However, this figure does not include swipes on mobile credit card readers like Square and PayPal Here, only consumer-side mobile payments in-store.

$10 billion: Card readers are building real scale. Square’s mobile payments volume rose to $10 billion in 2012, up from $2 billion in 2011. Starbucks is switching its credit and debit card processing to Square, and as of January 2013 accepts the “Square Wallet” app at 7,000 locations. 

$14 billion: Though much of that volume was from PayPal-enabled mobile commerce, and not in-store payments, that’s still evidence of mobile catching on as a transactional platform.

7.9 million: As of year-end 2012, only 7.9 million U.S. consumers (less than 90 percent of the total) had adopted a consumer-facing NFC-compatible system like “Google Wallet,” or apps that use QR codes or other methods to generate a payment. Card readers seem to be way ahead in the game.

$3.95 trillion: With more than $3.95 trillion of non-cash transaction volume recorded in the U.S. alone in 2011, the stakes are high in this space.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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