News
A new report has been issued by Juniper Research and mobile payments network, Boku, that find that more than 4.8 billion mobile walletswill be in use by the end of 2025. This represents over 70% growth since the end of 2020 and means that almost 60% of the world’s population will have adopted the technology.
Unsurprisingly the fastest growing markets are Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa & Middle East whilst Western Europe and North America are comparative laggards. However even in the UK there is a boom in card-based mobile wallets driven by adoption of contactless during the pandemic and shift towards cashless society.
The report finds the Far East and China already had 1.34bn mobile wallet users in 2020 resulting in market saturation with growth in China of just 2.2% per year, whilst markets including Japan, Korea and Taiwan will continue to see accelerated adoption of mobile wallets with 98.4% market penetration by 2025.
Adam Lee, Chief Product Officer at Boku pointed out that there was a clear diversification of the mobile wallet market into card-based mobile wallets, like Apple Pay and Google Pay and stored value mobile wallets, like AliPay and GrabPay.
This offers merchants the chance to acquire valuable customers, many of whom only use mobile wallets, but in high growth markets such as India and Indonesia customers use an average of 2.74 wallets each meaning that not only do merchants need to accept wallets but they need to ensure broad coverage across each target market.
Jon Prideaux, CEO at Boku said “Mobile wallets have lowered the barrier to making digital payments and in parallel ushered billions of new consumers into eCommerce. These consumers are not in North America or Western Europe, they are in emerging markets, and while they don’t have credit cards, they overwhelmingly have mobile wallets.”
“For global merchants, mobile payment acceptance is not about accepting one type of mobile wallet or another, but ensuring that consumers in every market will have the required selection on payment types in order to monetize transactions.”
