CorFire Market Watch, 02-17-2012
Week ending February 17, 2012
Building NFC infrastructure: Visa says 1M+ chip cards issued
Visa USA has reported that U.S. financial institutions have issued more than one million credit and debit cards that use information on embedded computer chips to validate transactions instead of magnetic stripe technology.
"Migrating the U.S. market to chip [cards] will help build an infrastructure for accepting NFC mobile payments, enhance international acceptance and reduce fraud," said Stephanie Ericksen, head of authentication product integration at Visa Inc. "Since announcing our roadmap last year, we have seen strong interest among U.S. issuers large and small to invest in chip technology, as today's milestone shows. The progress is all the more significant considering that just 18 months ago there were no Visa-branded EMV contact chip cards issued in the U.S."…
Study: Shopping on mobile devices to increase by 53% this year in UK
Shopping on mobile devices in the UK is set to increase by 53% in the next 12 months hitting £4.5billion, making the British the biggest mobile shoppers in Europe for the third year running followed by Germany (£2.7bn) and France (£1.9bn), finds a new study commissioned by Kelkoo and carried out by the Centre for Retail Research.
Last year, almost half (46%) of mobile users in the UK owned a smartphone which led to shoppers spending a total of £3billion on mobile devices (£192 each on average), representing 8% of total online spend. There are an estimated 24.6 million smartphones currently in the UK – up from virtually zero in 2005....
comScore: Online retail spending surged to $50B in Q4
Consumers spent $161.5 billion on online purchases in 2011, and $49.7 billion in the last three months alone. Altogether, e-commerce spending in 2011 was up 13 percent from 2010, with online shopping surging 14 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter, according to market research firm comScore.
“The fourth quarter of 2011 capped off what was yet another strong year for online retail, one in which every quarter achieved double-digit increases versus the prior year,” comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said. “Price and convenience continue to be the critical value drivers for e-commerce, and unless those conditions change we can expect to see more channel-shifting to online in 2012 and perhaps even an acceleration in the current growth trend.”….
Juniper: NFC ticketing transactions to quadruple to $23B by 2016
One in eight (13%) of North American and western European mobile users will use their NFC-enabled mobile phones as a metro rail or bus ticket by 2016, compared with less than 1% today, according to Mobile Ticketing Evolution, a new report from Juniper Research.
The report also found that worldwide mobile ticketing transactions are set to quadruple to 23bn by 2016 and that NFC tickets will represent 50% of all mobile ticket revenue that year….
Report: 46% of phones to be NFC-enabled by 2016
MarketResearch.com has released a new report predicting that approximately 46% of all mobile phones will be NFC-enabled by 2016 – up from just 5% in 2011.
According to the report, “Near Field Communication Market Global Forecast &Analysis (2011-2016) By Products,” the NFC applications market will grow “exponentially” alongside the handset market, with revenues jumping from $7,686 million in 2011 to $34,515 million by 2016 at an estimated CAGR of 35%. This growth will be driven by the mobile payments segment, followed by the ticketing and access control.….
Facebook and Bango partner on mobile payments
Facebook has teamed up with Bango to provide mobile payment services on the social network with the aim to encourage smartphone purchases.
Facebook already make an impressive income from microtransactions from within applications and games as well as advertising. However not much of that comes from mobiles, which is where Bango comes in.
Bango already handles the payment platforms for Blackberry and Opera app stores, so it's got some serious experience at providing smartphone based payments. It's also likely to draw in customers that might have been wary about paying Facebook directly by putting their payment information on the social network. Doing so through a third party with experience in handling customer details securely, would likely be a load off their mind.