PayPal handled $4B in transactions in 2011

Up from $750M in 2009, PayPal is seeing more mobile payments in physical retailers

Retailers  across the board have been looking for the most reliable and efficient ways to get consumers to spend with confidence and mobile payment systems have become a larger chunk of that processes. 

One of the biggest players in the mobile payment industry is the right hand of eBay, PayPal. 

At the Consumer Experience Show in Las Vegas, the Mobile Vice President of PayPal, David Marcus has been touting the astonishing growth that the company saw in mobile payments last year -- $4 billion in transactions, up from $750 million in 2010.

Marcus first explained this rapid growth to VentureBeat at the CES conference.

The company itself had only projected its transactions to double for 2011, not increase more than five-fold. This skyrocketing growth is even more staggering when you look at the $141 million in transactions that came through PayPal in 2009.

We noticed that PayPal was going to have some exceptional growth when we reported in June that it would become a the biggest player in a $31 billion industry.

PayPal raised its transaction expectations to $3 billion, in June. Which, if Forrester’s research numbers were accurate, would mean that PayPal would then account for half of all mobile payments for the year.

Marcus has attributed this growth to to the fact that more people are confident in mobile commerce and the physical commerce companies that have incorporated PayPal (such as Starbucks.)

A few days ago, Home Depot announced a partnership with the mobile payment giant to allow customers to pay using a PayPal pin code (or even possibly a PayPal physical card.)

A July 2011 study from KPMG found that 72% of business executives say that mobile payments, on a large scale, are more likely to become the standard. A sizable 58% say that their companies already have some type of mobile payment system in place.

"We believe that exploding smartphone growth and a myriad of opportunities will grow mobile payments at a much faster rate than our respondents anticipate," said Gary Matuszak, KPMG global chair of the Technology, Communication and Entertainment practice, in a statement. "A wide variety of payments is ready for adoption, as several key players already provide or are rolling out mobile payments, and interest among consumers in utilizing mobile payments is growing, in line with the industry's readiness to deploy them."

Recent data from the U.K. arm of Forrester Research, in partnership with PayPal, estimates that mobile payments will replace other forms of payment by 2016 -- and this expectation could seem all-the-more likely now that PayPal is showing such tremendous growth.

Many banks, mobile payment systems and retailers are excited about the move from traditional wallets to digital wallets or smartphone transactions, such as Google Wallet. Even companies such as Square are able to make private transactions more attainable for small businesses and people sharing expenses.