Gartner is cautious

Gartner produced research indicating that mobile payment subscribers will increase from 33 million to 104 million subscribers in the next three years. This is quite conservative compared to some of the other recent results (see my blogs on this here and here) that were produced by other research companies. Especially their estimate of (only) 500 thousand mobile payment subscribers in Europe at the moment. I think companies like paybox in Austria would be surprised that they have more subscribers in Austria than those that Gartner counted in Europe... wait a minute, last I checked Austria was in Europe. Also the fact that they did not count African subscribers - does that mean that they do not know about the massive penetration of mobile payment subscribers in Africa (my estimate between 7 and 12 million), or that Africa does not exist?

I still remember a previous estimate that Gartner got terribly wrong: the "75% probability that 60% of companies were not ready for Y2K" predication. After all the angst that they produced during 1999, maybe policy now is that they should play everything down?

Positive report on mobile banking

Juniper Research released a very positive report on the growth of mobile banking from now till 2011, today. According to the research, subscribers will grow tenfold from now till 2011 to ultimately be 816 million (this is very close to the predictions made by Edgar Dunn (see my comments on this here). In addition transactions will increase from 2.7 billion to 37 billion during the same time.

What I found particularly interesting about this report is that the analysts tried to not only predict number of subscribers, but also number of transactions. This is of course important because it is an indication of how much banking will be used. I have done some quick calculations of the findings and this is what I found:

• The prediction is that every subscriber would (on average) do more than three banking transaction per month on their mobile. I found this to be quite low based on the experience that we have had with Fundamo deployments. We have seen transaction volumes that is as high as three transactions a day (or even higher).
• The volume of transactions will have to more than double every year to grow to these volumes. If the hockey-stick is more steep, growth could even be more spectacular.
  

Seems like we should be expecting some very interesting times in mobile banking.