Ovum Mpayment

Global mobile proximity payment users to surpass 1 billion by 2019

Feb. 25, 2016

Mobile proximity payments are the smallest, but fastest growing segment for mobile payments, according to the global analyst firm Ovum.

Ovum’s new m-payments forecast* shows that the total global user base for mobile payment segments will increase from an estimated 689.99 million users in 2014 to 4.77 billion users in 2019. This forecast also includes m-commerce and person-to-person (P2P) mobile money transfers.

NFC takes the biggest slice of the 1 billion users

The global user base for mobile proximity payments (both NFC and non-NFC) stood at 44.55 million in 2014, as shown below. Traction for NFC mobile proximity payments is, with a few notable exceptions, particularly low across the vast majority of mature markets and almost nonexistent in emerging markets. But by 2019 there will be a total of 1.09 billion global mobile proximity payment users, of which 939.10 million will be NFC. The total transaction value of mobile proximity payments (both NFC and non-NFC) will grow from $4.77 billion in 2014 to $141.21 billion in 2019.

Source: Ovum

A number of factors are behind the growth

Factors driving growth include wider merchant support for NFC across point-of-sale (POS) acceptance infrastructure, which in the U.S. is being helped by the upgrades to EMV. The adoption of host card emulation (HCE) is also helping, providing a more flexible way of implementing NFC. At the same time, NFC is being championed more widely across the ecosystem by players such as Apple, Google, PayPal, and Samsung.

See also “Prepare for an m-commerce explosion.”

*Ovum Mobile Payments Forecasts: 2014–19

About the Author

Rick Nelson | Contributing Editor

Rick is currently Contributing Technical Editor. He was Executive Editor for EE in 2011-2018. Previously he served on several publications, including EDN and Vision Systems Design, and has received awards for signed editorials from the American Society of Business Publication Editors. He began as a design engineer at General Electric and Litton Industries and earned a BSEE degree from Penn State.

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