Can mobile apps fix the recession?

Eight separate mobile financial applications will see daily use by nearly 2.2 billion mobile phone users worldwide over the next five years, according to Insight Research's latest report. Despite the fact that the World Bank is forecasting 2009 to be the first year the global economy is going to shrink since World War 2, Insight Research president Robert Rosenberg said that when the economy does inevitably recover, mobile financial apps will be a part of the global solution.

"We will all come out of this together, and the economy will be stronger for it," Rosenberg said. "[Apps] are little tiny pieces that when it starts to rebound will help to make the economy stronger, more integrated and more efficient. These apps have real utility all the way from places like rural China and India to NYC and Paris and Stockholm."

The recession is integrating the global markets as handset makers and financial institutions launch good-will initiatives in emerging markets where the mobile phone is the sole mechanism for unbanked consumers, Rosenberg said.  Insight looked at mobile stock trading, proximity and retail apps, credit cards, bar coding, peer-to-peer apps, gaming and gambling, and found that these eight apps, which today capture 950 million users, will bring in $124 billion to developers and the wireless operators that offer them by 2014.

Of the eight apps studied, gaming and gambling actually worked against the total revenue, Rosenberg said. They've been around for too long to capture buzz and are generally not transaction-intensive enough for carriers to take a significant chunk of the revenues. Mobile banking-specific services, on the other hand, are generally free now but should go the way of the automatic teller machine (ATM), Rosenberg said. ATMs were largely free when they were first introduced but now have come with a fee if not tied to a consumer's bank.

Near-field communication (NFC) still hasn't taken hold in the US, although it is slowly gaining traction in emerging markets. Nokia today introduced the 6126 Classic, its third handset to be fully integrated with NFC. The 6156 is Nokia's first SIM-based NFC phone, meaning its carrier partners can build NFC services into the SIM card. Using the phone, consumers in select markets – not yet in the US – can make secure payments and transactions by tapping the phone.

According to Juniper Research analyst Howard Wilcox, the industry is on the verge of a whole new world of ways to pay, but most phone users don't know it yet. He pointed to international companies O2, Logica, Mobilkom Austria and France as high-profile companies pioneering NFC trials and noted that retailers in the US are beginning to get on board as well.