Mobile payments to hit $670bn

Juniper Research this week released a new study saying the transaction value of mobile payments for digital and physical goods, money transfers and near field communications (NFC) transactions will reach $670 billion by 2015, up from $240 billion this year according to Tech Crunch.

It's further reported that during the next 18 months, 20 countries would start deployment of NFC payment systems and services and transactions from those services would be in the range of $50 billion by 2014.

Mobile makers such as Nokia and Samsung are also starting to integrate NFC chips into smartphones.

Mobile payments analyst Bob Egan of the Sepharim Group, however, told Macworld that the number of NFC customers in the US will be quite small for the next few years, “fewer than eight million customers making less than one transaction per week,” says The Independent.

Analyst Jack Gold agrees and adds that a wide roll-out of NFC payments could be three or more years away in the US.

In one of the more recent developments in the field, Google revealed its Google Wallet and Google Deals services in the US, and the search giant had large retail partners on board, which include Citi, Subway, Mastercard, Sprint, Macys, and Walgreens according to domain-b.com.

Various partnerships are advancing globally between telecoms and other stakeholders in the payments industry to take advantage of the burgeoning demand.

These initiatives are racing against time, since cashing in on the fast growth will rely on building a usable payments ecosystem, reports American Banker.