Mobile payment adoption tipped to surge

The total global mobile payments user base is set to surge from 689.9 million users in 2014 to 4.77 billion in 2019, Ovum has forecast.

Mobile commerce will be the biggest segment of the market, the research firm said, with an estimated 2.07 billion users in 2019. Person-to-person mobile money transfers and mobile proximity payments will make up the remainder.

The global transaction value of m-commerce is meanwhile predicted grow from $50.92 billion in 2014 to $171.16 billion this year, and $693.36 billion by 2019.

Eden Zoller, Ovum principal analyst for consumer payments and services, said the rise of m-commerce is being driven by the widespread adoption of increasingly powerful smartphones with larger and larger screens.

“Smartphones have become a platform that can support the whole shopping journey, from product search and discovery, through comparisons and recommendations, to payments,” she said.

China is on track to dominate the mobile commerce market in terms of user base, with an estimated 370.3 million m-commerce users by 2019. But the company will come second to the US in terms of m-commerce transaction value, which is predicted to reach $79.36 billion in China in 2019.

Image courtesy of Primus Inter Pares under CC