Mobile banking deals seen to reach $172 B in 2012

The value of global transactions employing mobile payment methods is forecast to top $171.5 billion this year. That’s a growth rate of nearly 70 percent over 2011’s $105.9 billion, according to a leading global research firm.

Likewise, users of mobile payments will grow from $160.5 million in 2011 to $212.2 million this year.

Research firm Gartner Inc. said Eastern Europe will experience the largest growth in users between 2011 and 2016, but the Asia Pacific region will be the largest in terms of the sheer number of users, followed by Africa.

According to the analysis, APAC and Africa will account for more than 60 percent of global mobile payments volume in 2016, with Africa, due to the high proportion of money transfers, the largest market in terms of transaction value.

North America is predicted to be the third-largest region by transaction value in 2016 at nearly twice the value of Western Europe.

“We expect global mobile transaction volume and value to average 42 percent annual growth between 2011 and 2016, and we are forecasting a market worth $617 billion with $448 million users by 2016,” Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner, said.

While Gartner is bullish on mobile payments in general, it said near field communications (NFC) as an enabling technology for mobile payments won’t really begin to kick in for several more years. NFC is a set of standards for smartphones and similar devices to establish radio communication with each other by touching them.

Instead of NFC, Gartner said short messaging system (SMS) or text messaging would be the dominant access technology in developing markets because of the constraints of mobile devices and the ubiquity of SMS.

In developed markets like North American and Western Europe, Web/WAP technologies will be prevalent.

The research predicts Web/ WAP access will make up approximately 88 percent of total transactions in North America and about 80 percent in Western Europe by 2016.

Gartner said that mobile payment growth in developing markets would be driven by money transfers and airtime top-ups, mainly due to the lack of secure methods for storing and transferring money.