Consider:

1. The British Retail Consortium's 'Cost of Payment Collection Survey' published last month showed that the use of alternative payment methods, now account for 5% of all transactions (more than double 2011), driven by manufacturers' money-off coupons and the rapid growth of comparatively new ways to pay such as PayPal and online payments.
2. Apple launched a Passbook App as part of the iPhone operating system in the autumn 2012. It was intended to be a repository for anything that would be kept in a wallet, including airline and train tickets, coupons, rewards cards, entertainment passes and gift cards. In the USA, CashStar, a leading provider of digital gift cards for several dozen big name brand retailers, including Starbucks, Dunkin  Donuts, Sephora, Williams-Sonoma, Gap, Best Buy and others, has found that in the 10 months since Passbook's launch about one-third of all digital gift cards that are sent to someone are opened on a smartphone, two-thirds of which are iOS 6 (Apple) devices. About 30 percent of those are actually added to the Passbook app. Major airlines have embraced Passbook, as have movie theatres, ticket companies and some sports leagues.
3. Apple has 575 millions registered credit cards on their iCloud/iTunes system
4. In the USA, Passbook is changing shoppers habits as:
   1. ⁃ users are starting to understand what Passbook can do
   2. ⁃ people are actually spending money in Passbook: CashStar says "millions of dollars" in gift cards have been added to Passbook since it debuted. Though the number of users of Passbook gift cards is still in the "tens of thousands."
   3. ⁃ the Location-based reminders built into Passbook ensure that digital gift cards which have been added to Passbook, actually increases the redemption velocity even more
   4. ⁃ a lot of the gift cards added to Passbook are indeed gifts. Nevertheless, many are cards that customers load for themselves to use basically like money, e.g. Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts cards that are reloaded each month as a quick method to buy coffee with a phone.
   5. In times of financial recession and austerity, the use of money off coupons and gift coupons increase, and over the next few years are expected to grow significantly.

Storing digital gift cards and digital money off coupons on the mobile are an important training ground for mobile payments.

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Guess who is well positioned to take advantage?