"mobile payment" articles

Smart watch adoption is picking up in the United States. According to Parks Associates' most recent survey data, as of 2017 14% of U.S. broadband households own at least one smart watch. Consumer-reported purchase intention for smart watches has also more than doubled year-over-year, ahead of the holiday shopping season. 2017 is an important year for the U.S. smart watch market. Traditional fitness wearable brands Fitbit and Garmin have announced their first "true" smart...

The Apple Event was today, and Apple made a series of interesting announcements about its iPhone lineup. The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus were announced, and the rumored iPhone X was confirmed. These new iPhones offer more powerful processing via Apple's new A11 chip, as well as an Apple-designed GPU. This allows Apple to offer on-device machine learning and computer vision-enabled abilities which enable a number of new use cases. Apple's machine learning tech enables: Native...

According to Parks Associates’ consumer data, about 9% of Apple smartphone users have used Apple Pay, 1  and only about 3% use it regularly. 2 2015 was “the year of Apple Pay” according to Tim Cook. Apple’s failing to gain adoption, right? 3 No. Apple is focused on gaining merchant adoption before gaining consumer adoption. Here’s evidence that Apple’s focus for Apple Pay is not on consumer uptake: Apple’s iPhone 6, the first Apple phone that allows consumers...

Apple will host a “Spring Forward” media event on March 9, 2015 and many industry watchers, including myself, expect the iconic brand to officially introduce its Apple Watch for its fans to pre-order. For almost 6 months, Apple has drummed up marketing about the Watch and the media has been teased with conflicting details from official sources and unofficial “leaks;” by March 9, everything will be in the clear. The most intriguing question that I have is Apple’s marketing...

As a member of the Application Developers Alliance Mobile Payments Working Group, Parks Associates is dedicated to helping developers understand the challenges and opportunities presented in the mobile payments industry. As part of this effort, our newest publication, How to Keep Users Happy: Accepting Payments in Your Mobile App , explores the current mobile payments landscape, obstacles to improve user experience, and how developers can choose the best tool to ensure app...

This morning, activist investor Carl Icahn issued an open letter to Apple, urging the technology innovator to buyback more shares. As an industry analyst, I am more interested in Mr. Icahn’s rationales and assumptions about Apple’s future growth, and there are plenty in that open letter. We agree with Mr. Icahn on many fronts but also disagree with him on several other areas. Here is a quick summary of how I dissect his arguments. What we agree with Mr. Icahn:...

Alongside the headline-grabbing Apple Watch and the new, improved, and enlarged iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, comes the most eagerly-awaited news for those in the payments and retail space: Apple Pay. Apple has sat aside and watched while major competitors got a several-years-long jump on the mobile payments marketplace, only to founder and generate very little traction. As is its custom, Apple strategically assembled all necessary pieces of its planned product first and then waited for...

In its earnings call last week, Starbucks announced it now counts more than 12 million monthly active users of its My Starbucks Rewards app - a solid 20% growth in active users from 10 million just over a year ago (April 2013). The My Starbucks Rewards app is both a loyalty program and a digital wallet that allows users to store value in the app and pay at check-out by displaying a barcode on the smartphone screen. Transactions made via the mobile wallet now account for 15% of all...