Digital Nonprofit: Are Smartphones the new wallets?

Friday, October 19, 2012

Are Smartphones the new wallets?

eMarketer expects the transaction volume of mobile payments in the United States to reach $640 million this year and predicts a 100-fold increase until 2016. But are we really ready to ditch our wallets in favor of our smartphones?

When Apple released the iPhone 5 last month, some people were disappointed that Apple chose not to include a Near Field Communication chip for mobile payments. Others interpreted Apple’s omission of an NFC chip as proof that the time has yet to come for the technology to become relevant to the mass market. After all, Apple has a history of dismissing technologies until they have proven their viability. eMarketer expects 8 million Americans to make a point-of-sale purchase with their smartphone this year. That’s roughly seven percent of U.S. smartphone users and clearly shows that mobile payments are still in the early stages of adoption. If eMarketer is right, almost 50 million Americans will be using their phones to make in-store purchases by 2016. So the iPhone 7 will probably have NFC.