Monday, February 07, 2011

Fact: Emerging markets will grow faster

Andrew Burns (World Bank Manager of the Global Macroeconomic Trends), recently hosted a one hour Q&A session. (Read here). He touched on a number of issues, but quite telling for me where his prediction that growth in developing countries to be more than double that of high income countries (more than 6 percent in each of 2011 and 2012 vs 2.4 and 2.7 percent for rich countries).

We all knew this intuitively, but here is some hard evidence: Emerging markets will out-perform first world countries during the next two years by far. This, coupled with the fact that very little payment infrastructure exists in emerging markets is an indication of the importance for mobile payments. It is critical that mobile payments be launched on the back of this growth trend.

We will have to postpone first world mobile payment deployments for a while, as we attend to this major growth opportunity.

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