Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The acceptance of mobile payments in countries such as Japan, North America and some Western European countries will lead to 50% of consumers in such mature markets using a wearable device or their mobile device to make payments by 2018.

Three types of mobile payments or wallets were identified by Gartner, namely smartphones or wearable tech, branded mobile wallets from banks or credit cards and branded mobile wallets from retailers.

However, rather than mobile payment wallets that are tied to a device, Gartner forecasts that cloud-based solutions will have a better rate of adoption as they are able to "reach a wider audience and can support many use cases beyond face-to-face or in-store options".

Last year, a report on wearable payments from Tractica predicted transaction volumes will increase significantly over the next five years rising from around $3.1billion in 2015 to $501.1billion by 2020 and accounting for about one-fifth of all mobile transactions and 1% of all cashless payments in retail....

Nielsen's latest report on mobile payments isn't too surprising, save one tidbit: people like using QR codes.

The study, released Thursday, found that mobile payment users actually prefer methods involving quick response (QR) codes or bar codes.

Almost half, 45 percent, of the nearly 4,000 people surveyed by Nielsen said they use the method to check out with their smartphones.Akin to bar codes, QR codes are blocks of printed code used to store large amounts of digital information. For a time, they were showing up everywhere -- on product packaging, ads, marketing campaigns -- but were seen as unnecessary or gimmicky. In mobile payments, cashiers can simply scan the codes displayed on a customer's smartphone as they would any bar code....