Tap Into the Mobile Payments Revolution

Tap Into the Mobile Payments Revolution

The trends and contenders that are shaping mobile payments.

Thanks to Purefunds Mobile Payments ETF (IPAY) for helping us put this together.

Yesterday, user-friendly payment processor Stripe announced a strategic investment and partnership from Visa that values the company at $5 billion. Other investors that participated are not unknowns either: Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, American Express, and Sequoia. It was only in December that Stripe was valued at $3.5 billion and in their previous financing, they were valued at just half of that. Stripe will use Visa’s international connections to help it expand beyond the 20 countries it currently services.

This type of story is not unusual in the payment space. Companies are scrambling to scale or adopt new technologies that integrate mobile and electronic features to make it easier, cheaper, and faster for customers to pay. The reason for this is that the payments ecosystem has always been more cumbersome and more expensive than it should be. In the United States alone, retail merchants that accept card-based payments were charged about $67 billion in fees. Add the rest of the world to that pie, and it makes it clear that the payments space is as ripe for disruption as any other.

Mobile and electronic payments allow customers to pay for goods with a tap of a phone or the press of a button. Two of every three Americans have a smartphone, and mobile payments can typically happen faster with less fees. The earliest adopters of mobile payments have a younger and affluent profile: they average just over 30 years old, have a higher annual income, and spend over 2x more on retail than unwilling non-users of mobile payments.

Big Data and the Developing World

One of the most attractive benefits of mobile payments is the integration of big data and predictive analytics. Retailers will have the capability to link purchases directly with location (GPS), consumer behaviour, purchase history, demographics, and social influence. Analyzing this information will allow companies to reach out to consumers with tailored offerings, loyalty programs, and rewards. Customers will be able to take action right from their mobile device.

The opportunities in payments are not just limited to in the United States or even the developed world. Perhaps one of the most interesting opportunities for the mobile payments space is in Africa, where bank penetration is extremely low at only about 25% and mobile phone penetration is higher at 60%. Kenya is a good example of a market where digitization has reached a large portion of the population, giving mobile payments an 86% household penetration.

Mckinsey did an analysis looking at the size of revenue pools for mobile payments if each market in Africa had the same penetration as Kenya, and it sees the pools more than doubling in places like Ethiopia and Nigeria. With the population in sub-Saharan Africa expected to balloon from 926 million to 2.2 billion by 2050, their appears to be even greater opportunity.

Tapping In

The earliest potential in the mobile and electronic payments market appears to be in areas such as micropayments, incidental payments, recurring bills, peer-to-peer money transfers, and cryptocurrency. However, in the long term, the concept can be applied to many different facets of commerce.

Mobile payments may continue to disrupt the big payments market because of several factors including a young and growing userbase, ease of use, faster transactions, cheaper costs, and increased adoption. As Smittipon Srethapramote, who covers the North American payments industry for Morgan Stanley, concludes in a summary on the subject: “Mobile Payments can expand the global revenue pie from $175 billion to $250 billion, including $45 billion in developed markets and $30 billion in emerging markets.”