10 Need-To-Know Mobile Payments Facts

Mobile payments, as it always does, made a lot of news this week. We dug deep to find the 10 need-to-know stats that make their mark this week.

$175 Billion | PayPal’s decade of mobile payments volume

PayPal has officially been in the mobile payments business for 10 years.

“On April 6, 2006, seven years after PayPal’s first foray into mobile payments, PayPal launched a new way for people to send each other money, buy the things they loved and donate to charities directly from their cell phones via text message,” Bill Ready, PayPal’s SVP of global product and engineering, wrote this week.

PayPal’s traffic is now 30 percent on mobile, and over that period of time, PayPal has generated roughly $175 billion in mobile payments volume, which has hockey-sticked over the past two years — not all that surprising as consumers consider mobile as their “go-to” device. Just five years ago, mobile accounted for only 1 percent of PayPal’s payments volume.

$70 Billion | Projected value of virtual reality market by 2020

Wait, isn’t this a mobile payments data dive?

Yes, but that number and that market have caught the attention of Samsung Pay.

“Some conversations we have been hearing about is how great would it be if you could enter a store with your VR headset and you browse the store in VR. You can click and pick what you want. I would like to be the payment mechanism behind that,” said Nathalie Oestmann, head of Samsung Pay Europe, this week.

20 Percent | U.K. physical card payments under £30 that are now contactless payments

The latest stats from Visa Europe show a rise in contactless payments usage with a fivefold increase by shoppers.

“The trajectory for contactless payments continues to look very strong,” Kevin Jenkins, managing director for U.K. and Ireland for Visa Europe, was quoted as telling The Telegraph.

“Increasing the spending limit to £30 has clearly encouraged consumer adoption and retailer opportunity across Britain; families are now able to do their weekly supermarket shop and pay contactless. The increase has driven a demonstrable shift in consumer behavior,” Jenkins continued.

Visa Europe’s data shows that, in the six months since the contactless spending limit was raised from £20 to £30 in September last year, nearly 36 million transactions were made, with 95 percent of such purchases made on Visa cards.

400,000+ | Number of contactless payment locations across the U.K.

Apple is hoping to juice that number even further now that Europe’s largest credit and debit issuer, Barclays, decided to support Apple Pay.

“With Barclaycard and Barclays bringing Apple Pay to our customers, we can now offer the widest choice of ways to make and take payments in a way that’s most convenient for them,” said Amer Sajed, interim CEO of Barclaycard.

Barclaycard is Europe’s leading issuer of credit cards with 10.4 million customers in the U.K.

175 Million | Daily Alipay transaction volume

Alipay‘s team also released some new stats this week about just how many transactions it typically processes in a day. That number, it says, is roughly 175 million transactions a day and, during its peak times, some 85,000 transactions/second.

That sounds astonishing until you realize that Alipay has more than 450 million consumers using its payments method.

Alipay also announced that it is bringing those accountholders to Europe.

Starting this summer (Date: TBD), Alipay will enable those 450 million+ active Chinese consumers to use the digital payments option abroad in the U.K., Germany, France and Italy. The app will recognize where the Alipay user is and will push offers at places that accept it. The cardholder will be able to pay using a bar code at those locations.

400 | The number of jobs PayPal won’t be bringing to Charlotte, NC

PayPal CEO Dan Schulman announced this week that it won’t be opening up shop in Charlotte, North Carolina.

This move would take away the 400 jobs that would otherwise have been brought to the city.

Schulman joined the other finance and tech companies, among others, who have spoken out against North Carolina’s law that strikes down existing LGBT nondiscrimination statutes. This list includes Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Tumblr’s David Karp and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.

17 | Number of banks in the U.K. that now support Apple Pay

Barclays, as mentioned above, topped off that list. This means that, as of this week, all major U.K. banks now support Apple Pay.

That list is also growing in mainland China, where Apple Pay is now supported by 15 banks.

Back in the States, the list of banks/credit unions has also been growing, with 32 more added to its most recent list, including a number of smaller issuers — credit unions and community banks.

5+ | Number of banks using Touch ID to enable mobile banking

This week, another major bank — U.S. Bank — added Touch ID to enable mobile banking on iPhones. It now joins Chase, Bank of America, Citi and Capital One, who also offer Touch ID for mobile banking.

Beyond the Touch ID addition, U.S. Bank also announced that customers will have a new way to deposit checks via their mobile devices. Updated software in the U.S. Bank Mobile app has improved the image capture abilities by allowing customers to import a check into the app from various angles or under low-light conditions.

25 | The number of Amazon Payments Global Partners Program launch partners

Amazon announced a new program this week to make it easier for merchants and merchant aggregators to enable the familiar Pay with Amazon into their eCommerce site. Participation is by invitation only and available in the U.S., Germany, United Kingdom and Japan.

Public launch partners include Future Shop Co., PrestaShop SA and Shopify, among 22 others, which make up the many merchants with the opportunity to enable Pay with Amazon. Amazon doesn’t publicly release the number of merchants that enable Pay with Amazon, but it did report that merchants using Pay with Amazon grew more than 200 percent YOY between 2014 and 2015. Customers using Pay with Amazon grew more than 150 percent YOY.

2 | How many months before Google Wallet Card disappears

The 31-month experiment that was Google Wallet’s plastic prepaid card will end two months from now.

Late last week, Google announced that its prepaid debit card that was linked back to its Google Wallet app would be taken off the market on June 30 and will divert that attention toward the Google Wallet app itself. The MasterCard-branded plastic card allowed Google Wallet customers to access their wallet balance at ATMs, banks and wherever MasterCard was accepted.