How often do payment volumes blow by their predictions? If you’re PayPal and you’re talking about mobile payments, then it’s three times just for 2011. PayPal is now predicting a 50 percent jump in its mobile payments growth just since their February prediction of $2 billion. The number is now $3 billion.
That jump seems to speak volumes. First, it says a lot about consumer comfort with PayPal as a payments mechanism. It also says a lot about the convenience offered by smartphone-based software for making a mobile purchase or a P2P transfer. In addition, the growth underscores what we already know, that consumers are shifting their purchasing from their laptop computers and onto mobile devices like iPads and smartphones. No small amount of this growth is a result of that channel shift.
Today the Wall Street Journal reported on some updated numbers from PayPal as well – we’ve just raised our 2011 Mobile Total Payments Volume (TPV) projections to $3 billion. Mobile payments are growing at a rate we never could have imagined when we started processing them back in 2006 – in fact, this is the third time we’ve had to update our mobile 2011 projections. We first predicted $1.5 billion in 2011 mobile payments volume. At our analyst day in February, we upped that to $2 billion and just a few months later, we have now added another billion to that number.
We’re thrilled by this news, and by other numbers we’ve seen climb in the past few months. We’re now seeing up to $10 million in mobile TPV a day – a big increase from the $6 million we reported in March. And we currently have eight million customers who are regularly making purchases on their mobile phones, up from a previously reported six million users.