According to a new forecast from eMarketer, U.S. mobile payments at the point-of-sale, including NFC, QR codes and other methods, will grow from under $4 billion in 2014 to nearly $9 billion this year before really taking off in 2016 when mobile contactless payments are expected to exceed $27 billion. The number of mobile proximity payment users in the U.S. is expected to double over this time frame while the average amount each user spends via mobile at the point-of-sale grows nearly threefold.
While the number of consumers in the U.S. who make mobile payments at the point-of-sale is increasing quickly, it is still only a small subset of all mobile users. eMarketer estimates that 10 percent of smartphone owners made a mobile POS purchase in 2014, and this is expected to grow to 19 percent by the end of 2016. By 2019, however, it is forecasted that nearly one-third of smartphone users and more than one-quarter of all mobile phone users will make at least one mobile POS purchase per year.
