Asia-Pacific tops in mobile banking

The Asia-Pacific will continue to have the most number of mobile banking users in the world.

Research firm Gartner Inc. said Asia-Pacific will be the largest market in terms of the sheer number of users between 2011 and 2016. Gartner said that mobile payment growth in developing markets such as those in Asia Pacific would be driven by money transfers, among others mainly due to the lack of secure methods for storing and transferring money.

Asia-Pacific and Africa will account for more than 60% of global mobile payments volume in 2016. Because of its high proportion of money transfers, however, Africa will become the largest market in terms of transaction value.

North America is expected to be the third largest region by transaction value in 2016 at nearly twice the value of Western Europe.

Gartner also reported that the value of global mobile payment should top US$171.5 billion this year, a growth of nearly 70% from US$105.9 billion in 2011.

Gartner said short messaging system (SMS) or text messaging would be the dominant access technology in developing markets because of the ubiquity of SMS. In developed markets like North America and Western Europe, Web/WAP technologies will be prevalent.

“We expect global mobile transaction volume and value to average 42% annual growth between 2011 and 2016, and we are forecasting a market worth US$617 billion with 448 million users by 2016,” said Sandy Shen, Gartner research director.