Worldwide mobile payment transaction values will surpass $171.5 billion in 2012, a 61.9% increase from $105.9 billion in 2011.
According to Gartner, the number of mobile payment users will reach 212.2 million this year, up from 160.5 million last year.
“We expect global mobile transaction volume and value to grow an average of 42% between 2011 and 2016, and we are forecasting a market worth $617 billion with 448 million users by 2016,” said research director Sandy Shen. “This will bring opportunities for service and solution providers that will need to cater to the local demand patterns to customize their offerings.”
Gartner also found that the market will experience fragmented services and solutions for the next two years. Technology providers will have to cater their solutions to the local market that will be using different access technologies, business models and partners, and under different regulatory conditions.
“There will be a few global players that have the scale and resources to serve large customers and the mass market whose requirements can be readily satisfied by standard solutions,” Shen said.
She added that, on the other hand, there will always be segments that cannot be sufficiently served by the global players. Shen said the demand of these segments can only be satisfied by specialized or local players that can better understand the segment and have specific solutions to meet the unique challenges.
SMS remains the dominant access technology in developing markets because of the constraints of mobile devices and the ubiquity of SMS. Web/WAP is the preferred access technology in North America and western Europe where mobile internet is commonly available and activated on user devices. Gartner expects Web/WAP access to account for about 88% of total transactions in North America and about 80% in western Europe by 2016. Near field communication (NFC) transactions will remain relatively low through 2015, although growth will start to pick up from 2016.