“M-commerce and mobile contactless transactions, driven by their allure of convenience, are poised to promote cashless societies all over the world,” said Nizar Assanie, vice president at IEMR. “Our usage surveys reflect a trend of mobile payments growing commonplace in the Western world, corroborated by the fact North American and Western European markets are geared up for the beginning stages of a full-fledged adoption of the digital wallet.”

IEMR’s Global Mobile Payment Market Forecast covers annual forecasts of mobile payment users, transactions by technology (NFC, SMS, WAP, USSD), and by type of purchase (merchandise, digital products, ticketing, mobile money transfers, bill payments, and pre-paid top-ups). The report is based on IEMR’s Global Consumer Telecommunications Survey of 50,000 mobile users in 50 markets worldwide.

The report illustrates a declining trend in SMS transactions relative to the growing adoption of NFC technology in developed markets, particularly Western Europe and North America. IEMR says that NFC offers the potential “sweet spot” of access to millions of retail point-of-sale terminals - a transaction technology that SMS falls short of.

According to the report, there were 1.5 billion NFC transactions globally in 2010. It forecast the comparable figure to jump to 55.3 billion in 2015, a compound annual growth rate of 105.2%.