mPOS Transaction Values Will Exceed $1.9 Trillion by 2024

New data from Juniper Research forecasts that mPOS (Mobile Points of Sale) transaction values will exceed $1.9 trillion by 2024, up from $850 billion in 2019. This growth will be driven by service adoption from new business users, including pop-up stores and street vendors, for whom the acceptance of card payments was previously inaccessible.

The new research identified India and China as countries primed for the expansion of POS adoption, assisted by high smartphone penetration rates and the growing acceptance of cashless payments. The research found that the shift from legacy on-premise POS systems to cloud-based solutions will provide new opportunities for software vendors to attract smaller business users such as those in the retailer and restaurant space.

It urged POS software vendors to leverage the opportunities presented by the shift to cloud-based systems by developing one-stop-shop solutions through platform tools, such as app integrations. It forecast that China and India would offer significant opportunities for POS software vendors, with 60% of POS software spend attributable to these two markets by 2024.

The research forecast that cash transactions in China and India will decrease over the next 5 years, driven by China’s dominant share of global cards in issue and government incentives to reduce cash transactions in India. Juniper Research also forecast that popular digital payment services, such as Alipay and WeChat Pay, will be compatible with an increasing number of POS terminals and will play significant roles in the growth of mPOS and contactless transactions in India and China.

In addition, it forecast that strong growth of mPOS adoption and contactless usage in the US will contribute to the global growth of POS transactions following the completion of EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) rollouts.