• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, March 21, 2014

While the issue of mobile payments is far from settled, there are plenty of entities vested in helping determine where it ends up.

A research firm now has conducted a comprehensive analysis to find the top influencing companies and which conversations are having a measurable impact on the mobile payments marketplace.

The most dominant mobile payment firms are PayPal and Square and, other than MasterCard, all traditional payment providers and all U.S. banks are absent. International banks and wireless providers are significantly more influential than U.S. firms.

The study, conducted by Appinions for Forbes Insight, found the top most influencing companies driving the conversations on mobile payments. They are:

1. Apple
2. PayPal
3. OpenTable
4. Starbucks
5. MasterCard
6. Amazon
7. eBay
8. Google
9. Bank of Beijing
10. Verizon

The study also showed that among payment players, PayPal leads in influence while Visa and American Express have zero impact.

Among device manufacturers, Apple dominates with almost 10 times the influence of Google.

When influencers talk about mobile payments, the attention received varies. In order of attention received:

• PayPal
• Square
• Stripe
• Google Wallet
• Cover
• Isis
• Clinkle
• Venmo
• LevelUp

The study is based on a full-text analysis of more than 200 million opinions within more than 2 billion documents from December to March of this year. The review included news sources, blogs, forums and social media.

While the results may not necessarily reflect what is actually happing (or not happening) in mobile payments, it is what people are talking about.