The Mobile Payments Market Is a Fractured Field

March 9, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

Anyone who’s been watching the mobile payments market knows that it’s been on a tear of late, with lots more people putting the tools to use in the market, and with a lot more tools coming out.

One report suggests that mobile payment transactions will grow 210 percent just by the end of this year.

New developments, however, suggest that there’s still a lot of market being missed, due in part to the very nature of the market itself.

One fact sums up one of the major issues well, and it focuses on Apple Pay. In just the United States, only one in five users, roughly, have an iPhone that will work with Apple Pay, and have even tried the platform.

What’s more, even among that comparative few that have actually tried it, only a simple majority—56 percent—only use Apple Pay once in a typical week.

Several reasons are behind the lack of use, some project; security is still a major hangup for users, and the lack of a global standard makes it difficult to shop outside one’s geography, a disaster given the world’s increasingly interconnected nature.

Others note how difficult it can be to uninstall the mobile wallet apps already in place on a device, along with the different options that businesses will have to offer customers.

Basically, it’s reaching the point where there’s a mobile payment app for just about every business individually, along with some that work at a variety of different businesses.

Businesses are needing to make choices about just what can be accommodated, since to accommodate everything else at once would require a huge investment, more than most could stand.

This makes for a great deal of problem. With no clear winners emerging in the mobile payments field, the fractured nature of the field will carry on.

Consolidation would seem to be one of the biggest steps to help close this industry’s ranks, but that’s the kind of thing that can really only happen when some firms exit the market. Right now, no one’s looking to be in a hurry to leave, and that’s keeping the market highly split among a lot of choices.

Given that most of the firms involved are backed up by other forms of business, we may well be dealing with a fractured field for some time to come.