Consumers will still be using their plastic credit and debit cards the vast majority of the time in 5 years from now.
The release of Apple Pay has caused many people to think that this is the point at which mobile payments will be taking off, but a recent report has suggested that by 2019, these smartphone based transactions will still make up only 1 percent of all consumer spending in the United States.
Many feel that the growth of Apple Pay is restricted as it does not share spending data with merchants.
That said, Apple Pay has certainly made an impact on mobile payments as a whole, as early adopters have seemed to be much more likely to use that service than any of the range of other options that have been available for quite some time. It is also likely that this will be the system that will dominate the smartphone based American consumer spending throughout the next decade, said the recent report. This report was produced by Forrester Research.
The Forrester Research blog called the growth of mobile payments an “evolution” instead of a “revolution”.
Although there has been a lot of speculations that by 2025, the majority of Americans will be using a mobile wallet, experts in the industry are now starting to suggest that this may not even be close to the case. In a report that Forrester produced for its clients, it stated that while it did predict that there would be a $142 billion in transactions using smartphones in 2019, that will be “just a drop in the ocean of total U.S. consumer spending.”
The firm predicted that among all types of mobile transactions – in-person, online, and person-to-person – they will make up only 1 percent of the total consumer payments in the United States by 2019, which are predicted to reach $16 trillion.
Denee Carrington, an analyst from Forrester still expressed that this “drop in the ocean” was not to be taken lightly. Carrington also stated that there remains “tremendous opportunity for mobile payment growth.” It is, after all, notable to point out that while mobile payments will represent only $142 billion in 2019, by the end of this year the total will have reached only $52 billion.
