(May 29, 2009) Spurred by the increasing popularity of smart phones and a strong push by financial institutions, the number of Americans actively using mobile-banking services could grow to 53.1 million by 2013, an increase of 431% from an estimated 10 million today. That’s the prediction from research firm TowerGroup Inc., which this week issued a report about what it calls mobile banking’s evolution from a niche play to mainstream delivery channel for financial services from 2008 to 2013.

Meanwhile, another research firm, Gartner Inc., predicts in a report out Thursday that the number of mobile-payments users worldwide will increase 70% this year to 73.4 million, up from 43.1 million in 2008.

Needham, Mass.-based TowerGroup estimates the number of active mobile-banking users in 2008 was 4.9 million, a number it predicts will more than double this year. The firm reached its prediction of more than 53 million active users in 2013 by reviewing banks’ reports about their online- and mobile-banking customer bases, interviews with bankers, and a review of historical patterns in new technology adoption after ATMs and the Internet came on the scene, says Charul Vyas, emerging technologies analyst. TowerGroup, an editorially independent unit of MasterCard Inc., defines an active user as someone who has made at least one mobile transaction in the past 90 days.

Mobile banking can’t happen without cell phones and their fancier cousins, smart phones, of course, and the number of such devices continues to grow rapidly. Citing data from the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, TowerGroup says there were 270 million mobile-device subscribers in the U.S. last year and 281 million this year. The firm predicts the number of subscribers will grow to 322 million by 2013. Much of the growth is coming from smart phones such as Apple Inc.’s iPhone and the BlackBerry from Research in Motion Ltd.

At the same time, banks have continued to push mobile banking despite strains on their information-technology budgets because of loan losses and other factors eating into their capital, according to Vyas. Financial-services firms of all types are expected to reduce IT spending by 3.6% in the 2008-09 time span, with U.S. banks cutting back 0.6%. Still, “mobile banking is what we consider a bright spot,” Vyas tells Digital Transactions News. “You can get it to market at relatively low cost compared to other IT systems.” Mobile-banking usage is widely seen as a prelude to using handsets for making payments. In its new study, Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner estimates the number of mobile-payments users will hit 190 million in 2012, representing about 3% of total mobile-phone users worldwide. “Momentum in the mobile-payment market gathered further in 2008 with a number of high-profile launches of mobile money-transfer services in multiple markets, participation of major global institutions in near-field communication (NFC) payment trials, as well as new payment solutions entering the market,” Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner, said in a statement. “However, at the same time, security concerns, an inadequate ‘ecosystem,’ and undefined areas in banking regulations remain challenges for mobile payment.”

In North America, Gartner predicts mobile-payments penetration to rise from 1.7% in 2009 to 3% of the mobile-phone user base and transaction volume by 2012. Gartner expects the Asia/Pacific region, including Japan, to have the highest penetration at 3.8%.

Gartner defines a mobile payment as paying for a product or service using mobile technology such as a short message service (SMS), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) and NFC. Its forecast includes bank-generated payments as well as mobile payments on alternative systems such as PayPal Inc, but not those on mobile operators’ billing systems.