50% of advanced market consumers to pay by mobile or watch by 2018

Gartner has forecast that by 2018, half of consumers in advanced markets such as Japan, North America, and some Western European countries will use wearable technology devices such as the Apple Watch or a mobile device like a smartphone to make mobile payments. Gartner also predicts that rather than mobile payment wallets, which are tied to a device, cloud-based solutions will have a better rate of adoption due to their ability to reach wider audiences and support users beyond face-to-face or in-store options. Aditya Kaul, Research Director at Tractica Research, suggests there is clear potential for wearable payments, with transaction volumes expected to increase significantly over the next five years, rising from around $3.1bn in 2015 to $501.1bn by 2020. Mr Kaul identifies the Barclays bPay system, Swatch's partnership with UnionPay, Alipay's partnership with Xiaomi in China, and Disney's successful deployment of its MagicBand closed-loop payment and ticketing system at its theme parks, as some of the key early market initiatives set to develop as part of the wearable technology phenomenon.

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