mobile technology – World Institute of Diginomics

“Will that be by cash, credit, check … phone or watch?”

Francisco Gonzalez, BBVA Bank chairman, predicts his bank’s chief competitors in the future will not be the likes of Chase Manhattan, Bank of America or J. P. Morgan, but software behemoths like Apple, Samsung, Google and Amazon. The new emphasis, he says, is in mobile payments. “Mobile has emerged as the driving force for disruptive innovation in banking,” he said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona the first week of March 2015.

He should know. “The number of BBVA mobile customers has increased 14-fold in three years and totaled 4.3 million at the end of 2014,” he reported.

Not Your Grandpa’s World Anymore

“The days of carrying wads of cash and paper check books are quickly fading,” reports Nielsen Newswire in December 2014, in a post: Digital Money Management: Millennials and Boomers. “The world has gone digital, and payment methodologies are rapidly gaining prominence among savvy consumers.” The report goes on to say that these “savvy” consumers do “live with their smartphones, which means their high ownership rates could be a key to future use” in the mobile payments & banking industry.

Interesting enough, according to Nielsen, leading the pack in the digital, mobile payment revolution is the generation on whose watch the whole thing got started … the Boomers, who are now today’s senior citizens.

“The vast majority (92%) of mass affluent Boomers indicate online banking is their preferred channel for paying bills,” Nielsen reports. Comparatively, “about two-thirds (65%) of mass affluent Millennials pay bills online.”

Mobile Diginomics to Replace Physical Money?

In a Pew Research survey released on May 6, 2015, 64% of U.S. adults own a smartphone. 57% use their smartphones for online banking services. Fifteen percent claim to “have limited options for online access other than a cell phone.”

Even more succinct to the “Diginomic Age,” in 2014, according to Comscore.com, mobile app usage accounted for “half of all U.S. digital media consumption” and, in March of 2015, “the number of mobile-only adult Internet users exceeded the number of desktop-only Internet users.”

“Mobile transactions are estimated to reach $670 billion within about three years. Digital goods are expected to comprise about 40% of this digital market,” says AccessPaymentSystems.com. “In an ever-changing technological world, physical money and credit or debit cards may become obsolete. Easy to lose and easy to have stolen, these ‘old-fashioned’ ways of paying for goods and services may be going the way of the older trade systems.”

“A new civilization is emerging in our lives. This new civilization brings with it new family styles, changed ways of working, loving and living; a new economy, new political conflicts, and beyond all this, an altered consciousness as well.”

– Alvin Toffler, “Creating a New Civilization” (1995)

In this transition of which Toffler speaks, cultures everywhere are being redesigned along digital guidelines, creating what we would call diginomic lifestyles. As the world reshapes and redesigns itself, it is rapidly and optimally adopting the technologies required to maximize convenience. Don’t sweat it! There’s no need. Just push that button.

Like the car commercial whose ubiquitous mantra is “Zoom! Zoom!” – the evolving Diginomic Lifestyle is one in which the speed of Life needs the speed of Light to thrive and prosper.

A World Market in Your Pocket

“There can no longer be any doubt that the future of business is inextricably bound up with the Internet,” says John Chambers, president/CEO of Cisco, as quoted in the book, Digital Transformation in 2000.

Michael Robert and Bernard Racine agree. From their 2001 work entitled, e-Strategy Pure & Simple, “e-commerce is changing the rules everyday – making it even tougher for brick-and-mortar companies to develop strategies for survival in the new economy.”

At this moment (January 2015), the total world population sits at 7.2 billion souls, 3.1 billion of whom have access to the Internet … fully 42 percent of the earth’s population. That’s a lot of people coming to visit!

internet-users-by-region — Internet Users by Region (Internet World Stats, 2014)

In the U. S., the Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce reports that ecommerce is growing at a faster pace than street sales in brick-and-mortar stores. Estimates of U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the third quarter of 2014, according to the DoC (adjusted for seasonal variation, but not for price changes), was $78.1 billion, an increase of 4.0 percent (±0.7%) from the second quarter. The third quarter 2014 e-commerce estimate increased 16.2 percent (±3.2%) from the same period in 2013 while total retail sales increased only 4.2 percent (±0.5%). E-commerce sales in the third quarter of 2014 accounted for 6.6 percent of total sales.

Jonathan D. Freidan, E-Commerce Law: “Though online spending is still a fraction of total consumer spending, it is growing at a rate of more than 25 percent annually.”

According to one source (eMarketer), there are over 4 billion global subscribed users of cell phones today … over 67% of the world’s population. “By the end of the forecast period (of 2014), smartphone penetration among mobile phone users globally will near 50%.” According to a 2010 study by the U.N., “more people on earth have access to cell phones than toilets.”

Click and Buy

Aside from making phone calls or texting, new connection technologies in smartphones is on a fast track to being your electronic wallet whereby wireless purchases are made on the fly. It’s also being used as your personal scanning wand for food, clothing and department store purchases.

smartphone-users-worldwide — Smartphone Users Worldwide (eMarketer, 2014)

“We estimate that the total number of mobile phone Internet users will rise 16.5% in 2014 and maintain double-digit growth through 2016.”

– eMarketer

“Today’s younger generation will trade in their cash, credit cards and checks for mobile digital wallets by 2016, new research claims,” the International Business Times reported on November 24, 2011. “Children born today will be [the] first ‘cashless generation’ and will frequently use their smartphones in exchange for goods and services, according to a report by the research company Forrester for the e-commerce site PayPal.”

International business consultant and author, Kenichi Ohmae, in his book, The Next Global Stage, writes: “The interconnected, interactive, global economy is a reality. It is often confusing and disorienting. It challenges both the way we see business and the way we do business.”

“The mobile Internet – mobile commerce – will dramatically change what has already dramatically changed the world,” says Richard Silber of Accenture. “The wireless world will be a truly global market … Get ready for the ride of your life!”