NEW YORK—Thanks to increasing smartphone usage and a push for faster, simpler and more secure financial transactions, mobile payments could become a $3.4 trillion industry by 2022, according to one forecast.
If true, that would be extremely rapid growth. In the U.S. last year, eMarketer estimated mobile payments represented approximately $49 billion.
First introduced in October 2014, Apple Pay has become one of the leading digital payment services for U.S. consumers, but it doesn't yet dominate the global market. Chinese competitors WeChat Pay and Alipay have a combined one-billion users, followed by PayPal with 210 million users and Apple with 87 million, Slate noted.