Back in February of this year, when the threat of COVID was becoming a global cause for concern, we posed the question on this site about whether 2020 would be the year of the QR code.
There’s a counter on the homepage of the GSMA’s website which tells you that today, there are some 5.1 billion unique mobile subscribers in the world. Elsewhere in its pages you can see that there are now more than one billion registered mobile money accounts – that’s one in five of the world’s mobile subscribers.
This month’s Wired magazine has refreshed its opinion of the QR code from marketing gimmick to everyday essential.
Payments consultancy CMSPI believes the looming deadline in Europe for retailers to comply with the regulations around Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) for online sales could cause further damage to an industry already suffering from the effects of severely reduced in-store footfall.
The modern mobile industry is only a little over 30 years old – the mobile money market barely a decade. Yet the power of that mobile device to change habits and revolutionise the way we live is both breathtaking and undiminished. The GSMA released a report this month that showed there are now more than one billion mobile money accounts active in the world.
In retail stores across the world, the sight of contactless payments by phone or by card has become commonplace. But more than 30 per cent of the world’s population are now considered digital shoppers and the online retail market was worth a staggering $768bn in the USA alone last year – and it’s a market that is expected to double in size by 2025.
Around the world the number of people using QR code technology is rising exponentially. A rise initially triggered by the global pandemic has continued unabated. In America alone, the first year of the pandemic saw a 25 per cent rise in QR code usage to more than 65m users. That became 75m last year, will be 83m this year, and be touching 100m by 2025.
There was a marvellous movie back in the 80’s called “The Year of Living Dangerously”. It chronicled the struggles of a group of people trying to go about their lives during a period of civil unrest. The film’s title has since entered popular culture and language. Substitute ‘pandemic’ for unrest and the title might be appropriate for both of the last two years.
