Do you have your wallet with you? It might sound stupid to ask, but let’s ask anyway: why do you carry it? You may answer by listing its contents: money, credit cards, loyalty cards, club cards, a family photo or two, business cards, etc., making it quite uncomfortable to carry all that in dispersed through your pockets. It was the need to store conveniently money that drove the adoption of wallets as cases for carrying money, rather than food or writing implements. By 1834 American English adopts the meaning of "flat case for carrying paper money" and wallets have changed little since. That is, until now.
According to a report published last year by eMarketer, U.S. proximity payment transaction values doubled between 2012 and 2013, doubled again in 2014 and should exceed by the end of 2015 8 billion dollars.
As can be seen from this graph, the peak acceleration in the adoption rate is expected to occur in 2016, even though growth will continue after that at lower rates. This should come as no surprise once we take into account the positive attitude towards mobile payments: an AYTM Market Research survey shows that more than half of their interviewed participants believed mobile payments would "probably" become widely used in the next five years, and 23.2% were certain about widespread adoption of mobile payments.
Do we have the ability today to get rid of the physical wallet? We do have the knowhow, but not the full infrastructure (yet); however this may turn out to be a short wait. Consider Danny Fundinger’s blog post "Using a mobile wallet: A day in the life". The author shadows a hypothetical character named Ana throughout her normal day activities, showing that we have everything in place to allow her only mobile payments. Below is an image taken from the blog that shows Ana’s mobile transactions.
It is clear to us that enabling your business app to do mobile transactions, easily and securely, is one of the core advantages you can acquire over your competitors. We already have integrated mobile payment solutions into custom-built apps. Now we want to take this one step further and make it available as a feature for low-cost apps. Stay tuned for more news!