A report from Gartner says the number of mobile payment users worldwide will exceed 108.6 million in 2010, which is a 54.5% increase from last year. This represents 2.1% of all mobile phone users.

Asia/Pacific is the leading region for mobile payment, with 2.6% of all mobile users - 62.8 million people - making payments on their phones. The report also notes that the Short Message Service (SMS) is still the dominant mobile payment technology in developing and developed markets.

Mark Bridge writes:

Last week I spotted a couple of mobile-related news stories that involved payment company MasterCard. One came from CPI Card Group, which had introduced a “next-generation, MasterCard-approved payment tag” (a.k.a. 'sticker') that enabled “any mobile device to be used to make payments anywhere using the worldwide contactless MasterCard PayPass standard” (by sticking it on the back).

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) are encouraging the launch of financial services by mobile phone in Haiti, following the January earthquake. Fewer than 10% of Haitians had ever used a commercial bank before the disaster.

The two organisations say enabling Haitians to send, receive and store money using their mobile phones has the potential to dramatically improve their lives and leapfrog more conventional banking models to safer, more affordable alternatives.

Telecoms research company Berg Insight expects the number of mobile banking users to grow from 55 million people last year to reach 894 million users in 2015. That's a compound annual growth rate of 59.2%. Asia-Pacific is expected to account for more than half of the total user base, with 115 million users in Europe anticipated by 2015.