Mobile Financial Applications to be Worth $124B by 2014, Study Says.

Banking and stock trading from mobile phones will become part of the daily routine of nearly 2.2 billion consumers worldwide over the next five years, says a new study fromInsight Research Corp, a Boonton, N.J. telecoms specialist. According to its market analysis, eight mobile financial applications together will generate nearly $124 billion for application developers and cell phone companies providing access to their applications.

A free excerpt of the report, "The Mobile Phone and Financial Applications Worldwide, 2009-2014," is available online.

The number of people using eight key applications will more than triple during the period 2009-2014, Insight Research predicts. They are: m-banking applications; mobile stock trading; mobile proximity and retail applications; mobile credit cards; mobile bar coding; mobile peer-to-peer applications; mobile gaming; and mobile gambling. The study noted that although all the applications run on the same end-user device—the mobile phone—each application comes with a unique set of factors that influence its market acceptance and market prospects. Insight Research therefore mapped and forecasted applications independently of each other.

"The World Bank is predicting that the global economy is going to shrink this year for the first time since the Second World War, and though no one can predict when the present recession will end, it is a safe bet that it will," says Insight Research president Robert Rosenberg. "Our analysis suggests that the eight cell phone financial applications covered in this study will be part of the solution. When this recession ends, the global financial system will emerge stronger and more tightly integrated, and the cell phone's new financial transaction capabilities will be a part of the foundation of that recovery," Rosenberg concluded.

The full 148-page report is priced at $3,995 (hard copy). Adobe Acrobat (PDF) report licenses are also offered.