“Global Mobile Payment Methods: First Half 2015”, a new report by Germany-based secondary market research organization yStats.com, sheds a light on mobile payment trends around the world. Among the findings are increased mobile payment user penetration and intense rivalry between payment providers.
Around the world, mobile payments are on the rise. Despite more than half of consumers having concerns about data security when using mobile payments, the share of mobile payment users reached two-digit figures across the major markets, such as the UK, the USA, Japan, China and others. Asia-Pacific was ahead of Europe, the USA and Latin America in 2014 in mobile payment user penetration. In China, the number of mobile payment users almost quadrupled in the past two years. Third-party mobile payments in this country, led by Ailpay, increased nearly five-fold.
The mobile payment trend is noticeable in Europe also. Eastern European countries Turkey and Poland ranked above the others in the region in mobile payment user penetration in early 2015, while of the EU5 countries, Italy was on top. In the USA, the share of adults who used mobile payments increased to over 20% in 2014. Furthermore, some countries in the Middle East and Africa continue to demonstrate the power of mobile payments in markets with low banking penetration. In Kenya, the number of transactions with mobile money neared one billion, and in Nigeria both the number and value of mobile payments grew at high triple-digit rates.
Rivalry among mobile payment providers remains intense. Since the beginning of 2015, Apple Pay expanded from the USA to the UK, Samsung launched a trial of Samsung Pay in South Korea, and Google unveiled its new mobile wallet solution, Android Pay. As mobile payments continue to boom, more market offerings are expected to join the race.
