Just How Much of the Mobile Payments Market Will Apple Pay Control?

When Apple Pay arrived in the middle of a mobile payments market heavily clustered with options, there were those who were skeptical about Apple’s ability to perform in such a field.

Others, however, chose instead to look at Apple’s massive install base and work from there. Some of those have even begun to wonder just how far the juggernaut that is Apple can go in the field. Some industry experts believe that 20 percent of the mobile payments market may be comprised of Apple Pay transactions by just 2019.

Those projections came from Investors.com, who pointed to a survey from RBC Capital Markets that concluded that Apple’s security measures—particularly its Touch ID security which makes use of fingerprint biometrics—could be just what the mobile payments market really needed to put some life into it.

Throw in the added incentive that Apple Pay simultaneously puts more near-field communications (NFC) hardware into the hands of consumers, and that might throw even more extra spark into things.

The RBC survey suggested that, indeed, the Apple Pay portion of the market might well top out at 20 percent, but this was actually given as part of a range, with those surveyed believing that it could be between 10 and 20 percent of the field, still a substantial market share either way.

Given that, at last report, only about 15 to 20 percent of retail outlets in the United States have some kind of NFC capability, it could cast something of a doubt on the RBC study.

Yet with businesses knowing that Apple Pay is likely to be a big deal, that may well spur said businesses on to bring in the NFC gear. With the EMV upgrade next October, it may be advantageous to support NFC with new POS terminals and bring in shoppers who are keen to pay with Apple Pay.

Reports suggest that customers are fond of Apple Pay for its sheer ease of use, and given how many new devices Apple tends to move, the end result should be a positive one.

It would be easy to call these figures exaggerated, to say it was next to impossible for Apple to take 10 to 20 percent of the entire market for mobile payments, it’s worth noting that Apple has a huge amount of users. Of course, Apple Pay’s overall effectiveness could be somewhat limited, particularly by the realization that some businesses refuse to take Apple Pay in favor of an upcoming mobile payment competitor, CurrentC.

But if CurrentC doesn’t gain traction, the national retailers backing it may have to reconsider just to better engage Apple loyalists. It remains to be seen if Apple Pay can really take that large of a portion of the market for itself, but the end result may well shake up the landscape as we know it.