PayPal leads in global wars as tagged mobile wallet ‘Established Leader’
Global spend via mobile wallets is expected to rise by nearly 32% this year to $1.35 trillion, a new study from Juniper Research has found.
The study found that spend is currently concentrated in the Far East and China, due primarily to the success of Alipay and WeChat. However, it claimed that moves by PayPal and Apple to offer wallets which can be used both instore and online means that wallets will increasingly become the default payment mechanism in other markets.
The research highlighted PayPal’s decision to introduce a host card emulation (HCE) near field communication (NFC) solution to enable point of sale (POS) payments as a key disruptive moment in the wallet wars. According to the research, this, allied to the burgeoning success of its social payments subsidiary Venmo, places PayPal in pole position to capitalise on the increased demand for mobile wallets.
Indeed, the research company classified PayPal as the ‘Established Leader’ within its Mobile Wallets Leaderboard, which provides a comparative assessment of wallet providers including Alipay, Apple, Mastercard, Paytm, Samsung and WeChat.
Additionally, the research argued that the implementation of the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) legislation should spur further competition within the European wallet space, with existing players poised to introduce additional services to complement their payment offerings.
However, it warned that outside emerging markets, remaining mobile network operator wallet ventures were unlikely to gain traction. According to research author Dr Windsor Holden: “Network operators remain wedded to offline payments based on an NFC SIM card, at a time when more agile competitors are deploying integrated HCE wallets that also enable online usage.”
