• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, May 31, 2013

Mobile commerce is still in its relatively early stages. However, the coming growth is projected to be big.

Deep inside the massive Cisco Visual Networking Index Services Adoption Forecast released this week are some rather substantial projections around that growth.

The study is part of Cisco’s ongoing initiative to track and forecast the impact of visual networking applications.

The research shows that among all mobile consumer services globally, mobile commerce and mobile video are going to be the fastest-growing.

The report says mobile commerce will grow from 560 million users last year to 2.6 billion users in 2017.

And it looks like SMS will stay strong, continuing as the consumer mobile service with the highest penetration in 2017.

In 2012, there were 3.1 billion SMS users (82% of consumer mobile users), increasing to 4.4 billion users (95% of users) by 2017. But because of its high penetration, SMS has the slowest percentage growth in the consumer mobile service category with mobile commerce the fastest-growing.

The study notes that about half (51%) of the population globally have accounts at formal financial institutions and more (57%) of the population are mobile users. The lowest financial institution coverage (39%) is in Latin America where a majority (69%) are mobile users.

In many undeveloped regions of the world, there’s greater accessibility to mobile networks than to physical banks. I’ve heard this numerous times after making presentations to bankers and financial institution executives in Latin America.

As to where the mobile commerce growth is:

• Asia Pacific will have more than 56% of the total mobile commerce users by 2017.

• Latin America will experience the fastest mobile commerce services growth, followed by the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific.

• North America and Western Europe lead in the adoption of mobile commerce as a percentage of their mobile user bases, emerging market regions are the areas with the highest growth rates.

  We're moving into a world of mobile commerce.

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OMMA mCommerce, July 15, New York. MasterCard, Bank of America, Catalina, Giant Eagle, Payvia, Ansible, Moxie Interactive coming. Here’s the AGENDA.