Mobile payment transactions to hit $171.5 billion this year

212m people making them.

Gartner reckons there's been a huge spike in this growing market this year, with transaction values up 61.9 per cent on 2011's $105.9 billion.

And how do you define mobile payments? Well, not easily or quickly, that's for sure.

The dominant medium even after all these years is SMS - whether used for voting in the west or P2P payments in developing markets.

Then there's Web/WAP payment for digital goods that goes direct to the phone bill. Gartner expects Web/WAP access to account for about 88 per cent of total transactions in North America and about 80 per cent in Western Europe by 2016.

Then there's the more futurist stuff such as contactless NFC, which won't start to pick up until 2016. Even then it will be ticketing, rather than retail payment, that drives transactions.

"We expect global mobile transaction volume and value to average 42 per cent annual growth between 2011 and 2016, and we are forecasting a market worth $617 billion with 448 million users by 2016," said Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner.

"This will bring opportunities for service and solution providers who will need to cater to the local demand patterns to customise their offerings."

For the next few years Gartner expects a fragmented market of diverse ideas. It says merchandise purchases will drive transactions in North America and Western Europe. These will include e-commerce purchases where users buy online, as well as in-store purchases.

Gartner predicts a large number of merchants to introduce their own mobile payment services, trying to emulate one-off projects like that of Starbucks.

It adds that Eastern Europe will see the highest user growth between 2011 and 2016, albeit from a smaller user base.

Asia/Pacific and Africa combined will account for more than 60 percent of the global mobile payments volume in 2016.

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