Commentary
The 'Surprising' Forecast for Mobile Payments & NFC
- by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, June 5, 2013
Whenever projections are made, it often becomes news when the projections are either exceeded or fall short.
This phenomenon is often magnified around mobile commerce, it being both so relatively new and running at such a high velocity of development globally.
The latest NFC projections from Gartner are a good example. The big news, of course, is that the research firm now sees the growth of NFC payments as smaller than initially thought.
Gartner notes the lower-than-expected adoption. Part of this, of course, is due to the lack of NFC-enabled phones.
This brings to mind one of my favorite expressions commonly seen in the general news media when new economic numbers are announced: “experts were surprised.” The phrase begs the question of how could they be experts?
It’s not likely that many experts were surprised by the slower-than-forecast adoption of NFC payments, since the field is really just beginning.
The other news from Gartner relates to the lower forecast for mobile payment transactions overall. Rather than being a 42% growth over five years it predicted a year ago, the number has been revised to 35% growth.
Said another way, compared to what was forecast year ago, today’s prediction is lower.
However, this doesn’t mean mobile payments are shrinking. On the contrary, mobile payments last year were $163 billion; this year $235 billion, according to the research firm.
The new forecast for global mobile transactions four years from now is $721 billion.
Even if off by $100 billion either way, this will be a very big number.
And some experts, no doubt, will be surprised
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Chuck Martin is Editor of the AI & IoT Daily at MediaPost and writes the daily Connected Thinking column. He is a NY Times Business bestselling author and his latest book is “Digital Transformation 3.0” (The New Business-to-Consumer Connections of The Internet of Things.) He is CEO of Net Future Institute and a frequent keynote speaker internationally. Follow him on Twitter @chuckmartin and contact him at Chuck@MediaPost.com.
I like to refer to the phenomenon of Internet related guesstimates etc as "research as PR". Accuracy is not a prerequisite to getting one's name in the press for even a brief moment. As for experts, predicting the future apparently isn't as easy as we make it look :-). Just ask those selling financial instruments where prior results are no indicator of future performance.
Interesting way to look at it, Frank. In the case of forecasting mobile payments, there are quite a few variables, but the general agreement in most all the studies is that it's going up.