Welcome to C3’s Industry Insight blog series inspired by articles and comment on the web.

In today’s  blog Sales Director John Wood reflects on the wider advantages of Mobile Wallets, inspired by a recent TelemediaOnline post (more details below).

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Apple Pay was announced in the US in late 2014 and launched with quite a bit of fanfare in the UK in July 2015. Today, most of the big UK banks have committed to support Apple Pay, although not all were part of the scheme when it first launched.

For those who don’t know, Apple Pay is a mobile payment system and digital wallet service designed to change the way consumers shop. There is no doubt that the company has been leading the way in the effort to move consumers from the use of old fashioned physical wallets, packed with various plastic cards, to a world in which your iPhone or Apple Watch does all the work.

According to a new report from Juniper Research, approximately 148 million global consumers will make a contactless payment this year, and mobile wallet use will be the main growth driver, as almost 70% of new users who make contactless payments in stores are either Apple Pay or Samsung Pay customers.

I was chatting with Alex Meisl, from our partner Vibes, a provider of mobile marketing solutions, about the focus on Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and the soon to be launched Google ‘Pay’ as a payment mechanism and we both think that wallets represent so much more than this. The payment side is merely one of many functions that mobile wallets have the capability to deliver and we are really only scratching the surface of their potential. I believe that the bigger and certainly more interesting prospect is what this means from a marketing perspective.

Mobile wallets provide marketers with a new way to create and deliver branded content, such as offers, coupons, and loyalty cards, to their customer base across both online and offline channels. Consumers can save and organise offers and loyalty cards in a simplified way whilst marketers are armed with trackable, updateable and location-aware content to help them drive in-store visits, redemptions and RoI.