Mobile wallet and payment venture Isis said that on average it has activated more than 20,000 mobile wallets per day in the past 30 days, giving it at least 600,000 members during that period.
The venture, backed by Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ), AT&T Mobility (NYSE:T) and T-Mobile US (NYSE:TMUS), has been slowly dribbling out data on how it is performing in the marketplace since it launched on a nationwide basis last November. In a blog post, Isis CEO Michael Abbott wrote that the company's wallet activation growth rate doubled over the prior month. The company declined to say how many total wallets it has activated since launching its NFC-based payment service.
As of today, 68 mobile devices from Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile support the Isis Wallet, which now comes preloaded on 14 smartphones, with more preloaded devices in the pipeline.
"So what's next?" Abbott wrote. "We plan to further broaden our ecosystem of partners to provide customers with more options as well as new ways to save. We'll continue to offer compelling consumer deals--all with the goal of helping consumers become ever more comfortable with mobile wallets. Along those lines, we'll continue to innovate to ensure Wallet users have a simple and enjoyable experience while paying with Isis."
An Isis spokeswoman told FierceWireless that Isis is currently accepted at "hundreds of thousands" of merchant locations nationwide and at any merchant that supports contactless payments, such as McDonald's, Jamba Juice and Coca Cola vending machines. Isis declined to say how much money wallet users spend through Isis per month "since Isis is just the platform facilitating transactions."
In March, the company said that two-thirds of its users have installed at least one payment card into their Isis wallet, and that group of users makes an average of six to seven NFC-based financial transactions per month.
Isis' service relies on a "secure element" inside a smartphone that stores users' credit card information. Isis users can make payments with participating retailers and banks (Wells Fargo, Chase, American Express and others through American Express' Serve technology) by tapping their phone on a payment terminal.
The mobile payments market is not easy sledding for any player though, no matter how established. Earlier this week Square said it would shut down its Square Wallet app for Android and iOS. Square launched its Wallet app three years ago. It allowed customers to use payment info stored on their phones to pay for goods by checking into a restaurant and letting cashiers know who they were at checkout. However, that app seems to have foundered and Square is introducing a replacement called Square Order, which will let customers make pick-up orders from, and pay at, coffee shops, cafes and other Square merchants from their smartphones.
Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Wallet chief Ariel Bardin said in April that customers have been slow to embrace the company's mobile payments service. However, he said that Google plans to remain in the mobile payments space for the long haul, and will continue to tweak the technology in hopes it will take off.
Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) CEO Tim Cook recently said he thinks the mobile payments market hasn't been "figured out" yet. "I think it's a really interesting area," Cook told the Wall Street Journal in late April of mobile payments. "We have almost 800 million iTunes accounts and the majority of those have credit cards behind them. We already have people using Touch ID to buy things across our store, so it's an area of interest to us. And it's an area where nobody has figured it out yet. I realize that there are some companies playing in it, but you still have a wallet in your back pocket and I do, too, which probably means it hasn't been figured out just yet."
For more:
- see this release
- see this Isis post
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