The number of worldwidemobile paymentusers will total 33
million this year and will rise to 104 million by 2011, says
analyst Gartner.
Short message service (SMS) is currently the dominant
mobile payment technology, driven by mobile money transfers,
and it will remain so through to 2011, says Gartner.
The analyst defines mobile payment as paying for a product or
service using mobile technologies such as SMS, wireless application
protocol (WAP), unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) and
near field communications (NFC). It excludes telebanking by using a
mobile phone to call a service centre, as well as mobile ticketing
where the ticket value has been prepaid and stored on the
phone.
"Mobile payment could bring revenue opportunities for carriers
and, potentially, banks, if deployed properly," said Gartner
analyst Sandy Shen.
"The business case is more obvious for mobile carriers than
banks. However, banks can justify the investment if they look at
mobile as an extension of their existing channels and bundle
payments with additional banking services."
The Asia/Pacific region has the most mobile payment users, said
Gartner, with a projected 28 million users in 2008 - 85% of the
worldwide total.
Western Europe is expected to have 499,000 users this year, with
one million in North America.