The forecasts for the use of these transactions in the United States have been dropping like a stone.
Although the use of mobile payments on a global scale are taking off like a rocket, in the United States, predictions are continuously being corrected in order to reduce the size of the outlook within that marketplace.
The uptake of these transactions has not been anywhere near the rate of most expectations.
The most recent knock to the overblown predictions about the American mobile payments marketplace has come from eMarketer. In October 2012, that firm had forecasted that within 2013, the market in the United States would grow to reach $2.2 billion. However, by halfway through the year, it had already slashed that forecast in half, predicting that this year will come to only $1 billion.
More recently other giants in the industry have also faced slowdowns in their mobile payments estimates.
Both Google and Isis, massive mobile payments wallet projects, have shown that the adoption of their services hasn’t been nearly as great as had been anticipated in the U.S. However, at the same time, the rest of the world appears to be headed in a different direction altogether.
Gartner, for instance, has shown that this year there has been an increase in global mobile payments transactions by 44 percent, bringing them to $235.4 billion. Clearly the trend outside of the United States is going in an entirely different direction than it is within the country.
Many theories have been presented to help to explain why mobile payments aren’t taking off as expected among American consumers. Among them is that there is a lack of standards and that the adoption of NFC technology at point of sale terminals has been a slow one. That tech will make up only 2 percent of all of the smartphone based transactions this year, and is now expected to make up only 7 percent by 2017.
One company that has broken itself away from the overall trend in the United States is Starbucks. There, tap and pay, QR codes, and other mobile payments techniques have been extremely popular and continue to spread like wildfire.
