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To most Americans and Europeans, the mobile payments industry is just starting to get off the ground. With Facebook’s option to send money to friends via mobile, new offerings from Square Pay, and the recent release of iPhone 6 and Apple Pay, TechCrunch reports that 2015 seems like the “Year of Mobile Payments.” But the fact is that a lot of these options are way behind what’s happening in other parts of the world.

There’s a distinction between these “mobile wallets” which merely link a user’s credit or debit card to their mobile device, and mobile money, where your phone actually holds the value like a mini-bank. Mobile Money is proliferating in many parts of the world where access to traditional banking is not available to many, and it’s in these places in Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, where mobile money is really taking off, advancing far beyond what is available to people in Europe and North America.
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Mobile wallets are being introduced to the market in a steady stream of configurations from passive containers to dynamic payment products. Companies large and small are vying for a piece of a future market. Along the way, these emerging payment forms are reshaping traditional business models and impacting traditional acceptance brands.

In a new research report, Mobile Wallets: The Business and the Brand, Mercator Advisory Group applies a business model canvas approach to analyze examples of developing mobile wallet types based on first-person interviews with the leaders of these companies. In addition, this report breaks apart the impact of branding based on different mobile wallet structures to discuss the effect on traditional payment brands as well as the challenges new acceptance marks face in the market. [Read more…]