83% of Execs Predict Wide Mobile Payments Adoption in 4 Years

About 83 percent of 1,000 executives surveyed by KPMG in the financial services, technology, telecommunications, and retail industries believe that mobile payment will be widely accepted by consumers within four years, compared to only nine percent who see them as mainstream today. In fact, 46 percent believe mobile payments will be mainstream within two years.

Approximately 72 percent of the executives predict mobile payment to be reasonably important in the future, with specialist online systems building on its leading position as a payment method, and mobile banking and near field communication (NFC) gaining significantly greater traction than today. In addition, 58 percent said they a mobile payment strategy is already in place.

One should typically treat all such forecasts with a bit of skepticism. There is a tendency for observers, no matter how well informed, to overestimate impact in the early part of a new business development of this magnitude. But it suggests a rather broad consensus that something important is growing.

But the results also indicate how much the new ecosystem is bringing formerly disparate industries into cooperation and competition. Typically, disruption occurs when some online service or application threatens to displace only one existing business and set of providers. Mobile payments, and the wider mobile commerce business, has leaders and attackers in multiple industries, perhaps in  five or so distinct fields, having to protect or grow their existing profiles. That will lead to a chaotic and complex adoption path.

The other unknown is whether the business, obviously a scale game, will result in just a few large ecosystems, or whether a common core of platforms will allow many niche providers to become established.

The survey took place in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Asia/Africa, and Asia Pacific, involving 970 business people, including 250 in the U.S., in primarily the financial services, technology, telecommunications and retail industries.

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