Mobile Money and Mobile Commerce -is now the inflection point? PART 2

In the second part of this post, you can find the rest of the Infographics on Mobile Money produced by Sapient.

The first in the series (below) highlights how the world's "unbanked" are acting as a key driver globally for the rise of mobile banking services in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The trend is for more mobile banking services to be launched, providing key facilities like cash transfer and Point-Of-Sale payments, with big corporate players getting in on the act.

The final Infographic shows a dramatic increase in m-payment users in the year from 2010 to 2011 and the likely increase in NFC-enabled devices and m-payment purchases.Privacy remains a key blocker in adoption today, though as the generation gap shortens (eventually) between the digital-natives and the analog-natives, this is likely to change.

Mobile Money and Mobile Commerce -is now the inflection point?

Back in 2008, I posted my very first entry related to mobile money by blogging about the rise of the mobile wallet here .

Progress has been painfully slow since then, both because of squabbling between the key stakeholders over who owns which part of the ecosytem and also because of the failure to address consumer concern over payment security.

It is inevitable though that mobile money will grow, both because of the increasing convenience of this payment payment (especially for the "unbanked population") and also because of changing consumer attitudes (electronic payment, even on mobile, is safer than carrying cash in your pocket).

Terrapinn produced this nice Infographic last month summarising the history of mobile payments from 1997 up  to today.2011 marked a significant turning point in the evolution of mobile payments with Google launching their Mobile Wallet, making payments simpler (See more in Google's video here).

There is a whole lot more to mobile money than just mobile wallets and a lot of talk is based around mobile payments, especially those using contactless or NFC technology. As Apple´s iOS6 gets set for launch and the new iPhone is tipped to be NFC-enabled, we will see a raft of new mobile payment players rushing to claim their stake in this space.

Sapient has produced a very detailed Infographic with some interesting background information about mobile payments. I have edited the graphic into readable chunks and you can see the first one below. Susbequent ones will follow in a next post.