PayPal’s 10th Mobile Anniversary Shows the Gains Mobile Payments Have Made

It’s hard to believe that PayPal’s mobile payments arm has been around for 10 years, but that’s exactly what we’re looking at right now.

With the tenth anniversary of PayPal’s first mobile services around, PayPal released a chart that showed us in one handy picture the upward trajectory of the mobile payments market, and gave us a look at what may be yet to come.

The chart itself is almost shocking. While the growth from 2006 to 2008 isn’t pronounced, it’s still visible, hovering under the $100 million mark.

But growth after that fires up in a staggering fashion, climbing to just under $1 billion by 2010.

A year later, the billion mark is shattered, and by 2012, the $10 billion mark is cleared. Another year goes by and 2013 approaches around $25 billion. In 2014, the $50 billion mark is approached…and nearly cleared.

With 2015, $50 billion falls like a gunfighter at the OK Corral, and 2016 looms like a titan from the shadows as PayPal delivers the biggest shock of all.

The cumulative total mobile payment volume figure, based on PayPal’s reports, is a combined $175 billion, and even PayPal admits that mobile is, as yet, “a tiny fraction” of commerce in general.

Just last year alone, PayPal processed 4.9 billion payments, and together, yielded $66 billion in transactions.

The plain and simple, at this point, is that mobile payments are here to stay, and in a very big way.

PayPal’s graphic alone illustrates this point, and when it’s considered that PayPal is just one among many—and an ever increasing number of services, as well—mobile payment services, it’s easy to see where this market is going.

IDC, just last summer, predicted a combined value of almost $4 trillion by 2020, and if everyone else is seeing the same upward growth pattern that PayPal is, that’s not out of line at all.

With mobile device makers getting in on the action, along with banks, individual stores, and even some cell phone carriers involved, it’s easy to think that the mobile payments industry could reach that $4 trillion mark.

There are enough mobile payments users to provide the fodder, and enough platforms to work from, so reaching that point might be easier than some expected.