Juniper Research is sticking fairly closely to its earlier forecasts by predicting that “NFC will facilitate” transactions valued at $74bn by 2015. This is over treble the estimated value of this market in 2011, Juniper said, and is roughly in line with forecasts Juniper made in 2009 and 2011.
In June 2011, Juniper forecast that global NFC mobile contactless payment transactions would reach nearly $50 billion worldwide by 2014. Back in 2009, Juniper forecast that the value of NFC payments in 2012 would total $30 billion. Now the analyst house thinks that the market will be worth $74 billion in 2015.
Juniper’s current Mobile Commerce Markets report shows that the rapid adoption of mobile devices for commerce-related applications is by no means limited to NFC. All segments – money transfers, banking, payments and coupons – are forecast to exhibit significant growth rates.
Report author David Snow said, “Our report demonstrates the spectacular growth we see across all segments of the mobile commerce market. Four of these segments (money transfer, physical goods, NFC and coupons) will more than treble in transaction value over the next three years, whilst digital goods, banking and tickets will still on average, double over the same period.”
The Juniper report, however, stressed that mobile commerce providers need to keep security issues in mind. Even if there is a perceived, if not actual, security risk in the mind of users, not only the specific mobile commerce application, but also the whole mobile commerce market may be set back until user trust is recovered.
Further findings include:
• SMS is the key to widespread mobile banking service adoption
• Without interoperability mobile money transfer services will struggle to gain a critical mass of users.
• Whilst mobile coupons still represent the smallest mobile commerce segment, it is demonstrating the highest growth rate.