Finance: Apple Pay's expansion effort shows no sign of slowing down (AAPL)

Apple Pay continues to expand its global footprint, with more than 20 financial institutions across the US and Europe adding support for the mobile wallet

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Apple Pay continues to expand its global footprint, with more than 20 financial institutions across the US and Europe adding support for the mobile wallet, according to Apple Insider.

This gives more consumers access to Apple's mobile wallet technology, and could very well be an attempt by the company to corner the peer-to-peer (P2P) payment market ahead of the highly anticipated fall release of iOS 11, the newest version of Apple's mobile operating system.

With iOS 11, Apple will introduce a new P2P payment feature that's attached to Apple Pay. Users will be able to send funds to friends and family directly from iMessage, Apple's messaging app. To do this, users will have to load a credit or debit card into Apple Wallet, which houses Apple Pay, according to Fortune; this implies that the offering will likely be enabled by any issuer partnered with Apple Pay.

By enhancing support for its mobile wallet, Apple is poised to see success in the payments space.

• Apple's new feature is leveraging one of the most important chat apps in the world, which could entice users to try it. iMessage has tremendous reach — it's on more than 1 billion devices — and as of early 2016, users sent more than 17 billion messages on the service daily. By adding a P2P payments feature into an app that users already spend a lot of time in, this payment option could become extremely sticky. This could boost Apple's presence in what's poised to be a massive market — for context, US mobile P2P volume will reach $336 billion in 2021, up from $19 billion in 2015, according to BI Intelligence forecasts.
• In turn, as more consumers are enticed to add their payment information into Apple Pay to use the P2P feature, they may be more willing to try the mobile wallet in-store and online. This could especially be true in European countries such as the UK, where contactless payments are already taking off thanks to convenience and ease of use.

Jaime Toplin, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on mobile P2P payments that:

• Forecasts the growth of the P2P market, and what portion of that will come from mobile channels, through 2021.
• Explains the factors driving that growth and details why it will come from increased usage, not increased spend per user.
• Evaluates why mobile P2P isn’t profitable for companies, and details several cases of attempts to monetize.
• Assesses which of these strategies could be most successful, and what companies need to leverage to succeed in the space.
• Provides context from other markets to explain shifting trends.

To get the full report, subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and more than 250 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >> Learn More Now

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