Mobile payments represent the big battle that is still to be fought between the giants of the industry. Retail worldwide was worth $15 trillion in 2013, with mobile being $235 billion of that. Mobile’s share is predicted to grow well beyond that and who controls those transactions will own a large part of the Internet.
Visa and masterCard are obviousmobilepayments contenders, as are Apple, Amazon and Google of course, but the start-up community is also in there fighting with companies like PayPal, Square and Stripe making inroads.
It’s a big tell that things are starting to happen when the magazine of Wall Street and big business, Forbes, leads with a cover story on the subject and then follows up with more reporting. There are rumors that eBay will carve PayPal off as a separate company to help it compete in this war, and there are new announcements almost every day.
Forbes’ Bruce Rogers:

“One unique attribute of the mobile payments market is the fact that six different industries are actively exerting influence over the discussion. This is a very different dynamic than we’ve seen in any previous industry or sector that we’ve examined. Financial institutions, retailers, wireless, traditional and mobile payment services, and device makers are all in the mix…”

The transition to mobile-device based payments is going to affect everything that happens online. If you’re already working on making your mobile transactions as seamless as possible, you should start now. This is going to move fast.
Read more at Forbes.