“Mobile wallets and mobile payments have been around since at least 2005. That's more than two years before the iPhone debuted for Apple! Bluetooth-based mobile payments were around in Europe even earlier. Why has it taken so long for mobile payments to achieve mass adoption?
The easy answer is a combination of consumer trust (or lack thereof), lack of standards, complexity of platforms on the consumer handset side, the merchant side and the payment provider side. It's a big, complicated bowl of spaghetti, or at least an M.C. Escher drawing!
A 2014 Bain Consulting report showed that mobile in-store payments are growing at 20 percent year-over-year, but are still less than 10 percent in the U.S. Business Insider projects that number to climb to 15 percent by 2019, which is almost $1 trillion in mobile payments. With that type of growth and its likely acceleration, there is no shortage of big players looking to stake a major position. Interestingly, virtually none of these companies would have been on a similar list just 10 years ago. The current battle heating up includes a long list of acquisitions that will only continue to grow.’
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