Apple Pay is apparently paying off big-time for the iPhone maker, according to a new report which shows there will be 450 million users of mobile wallets in just two years — and that Apple will account for about half of those, or 225 million.
The forecast out from Juniper Research includes mobile payment offerings like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay, among others. And it estimates that 1 in 2 of every user of a mobile wallet solution provided by their original device manufacturer will belong to Apple.
Maybe most interesting of all is how large Juniper’s forecast shows the mobile wallet market will be by 2020 — in-store contactless payments, according to its data, will reach $2 trillion by that time.
Nitin Bhas, who authored the research for Juniper, said that growth in the market over the next five years will continue to be led by offerings from the major players like Apple and Samsung, though Juniper’s data also includes newly launched offerings from Huawei Pay and Fitbit Pay. The data also shows that contactless payments will top $1 trillion this year for the first time, a year earlier than Juniper had originally expected.
Contactless transactions, according to Juniper, “will continue to be dominated by card payments, driven by strong adoption in Europe as well as Far East & China. Indeed, contactless card payments are the strongest across Far East & China and Rest of Asia Pacific, which together account for nearly 55% of global contactless card transaction values.”
It all suggests that Apple, compared to rival device makers, is apparently doing the best job of signing up mobile wallet users, especially when you consider the obvious point Techcrunch makes about the Juniper data: “What’s interesting about this new research report is that Apple Pay has such a large following, given how it’s Android-based smartphones, not iPhones, that dominate the worldwide smartphone market.”
As far as Apple’s offering goes, this follows news last week that eBay will start accepting Apple Pay soon. That will happen in a limited rollout starting in the fall.
Earlier this year, Loup Ventures also put out an estimate that Apple Pay was being used on a little less than 20 percent of active iPhones around the world, and that that number would increase as time goes on. That certainly fits the thesis of the Juniper data — and it’s good news heading into another Apple earnings announcement Tuesday.
To that latter point, Apple is putting more of an emphasis on revenue from things like its App Store and Apple Pay. Apple’s revenue in that “services” category surpassed $9 million when the company last reported earnings in May, which was a more than $2 billion increase from the year-ago period.
