Report: Mobile Wallets in the US – Review and Analysis

A new report entitled Mobile Wallets: The U.S. Landscape by Mercator Advisory Group identifies U.S. mobile wallets by category and technology.

The physical wallet might someday go the way of the checkbook, used by few and no longer a necessity. Growing consumer use of smartphones is creating a market for mobile wallets capable of serving many of the same purposes physical wallets served for centuries but now are able to take advantage of a plethora of new functions made possible in an increasingly digital marketplace.

For financial institutions, mobile wallets represent an opportunity to add more utility to their mobile banking apps, and the bankcard networks are making it easier for banks and credit unions to do so while also enabling them to maintain brand recognition.

A picture is beginning to emerge that suggests how mobile wallets will take hold. Instead of taking a $10 bill out of a wallet for a purchase at the point of sale, a consumer today might simply use a smartphone and tap a terminal or scan a bar code to achieve the same result. And rather than the clerk handing the customer coupons, perhaps on the back of the receipt, the phone might automatically receive both pieces of information from the terminal (to store for later use or to help manage the household budget).

Mercator Advisory Group’s new report, Mobile Wallets: The U.S. Landscape, reviews U.S. mobile payment trends, analyzes the wallets by function and sorts them into a taxonomy of the major players, their wallets and the most common uses.

“The mobile wallet market is a new frontier, especially in the payments industry, which has seen little change in technology or functionality for decades,” says Jeffrey Green, director of Mercator Advisory Group’s Emerging Technologies Advisory Service and author of the report. “This represents both a threat and an opportunity for players that have been in payments for some time. And knowing who these wallet vendors are and what they’re offering is becoming important in determining how to respond to the marketplace changes.”

Highlights of the report include:

– Analysis of the U.S. mobile-wallet market and categorization of products into three basic wallet categories

– Characteristics of the common point-of-sale technologies, how merchants access wallet credentials and the way wallet transactions are settled

– Examination of wallets using different technologies to support payments at the point of sale, online and for person-to-person funds transfers
– Comparison of storage and management wallets as well as mobile banking and payments platforms Discussion of mobile banking platforms and the role they will play in mobile payments.

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