The number of users making contactless payments with their mobile handsets will reach 300 million globally by 2017, according to Juniper Research.

The growth is up from the 110 million mobile contactless users in 2013, said the study, which argues that many markets are being seeded by the current popularity of contactless credit and debit cards.

The introduction of contactless cards has encouraged point-of-sale vendors such as Verifone and Ingenico to ship the majority of their terminals with NFC.

However, author Windsor Holden said the mobile industry still needs to improve user awareness about contactless and better educate retailers about its possibilities.

There is a tendency to sell contactless to retailers as a means for quicker throughput rather than pointing to the opportunities for customer engagement and upselling. Holden describes the latter features as “much lower on the radar”.

The study also argued that “the lack of a coherent business model had constrained NFC rollouts”, with the result that the cost to deploy a mobile payment card is more than to issue a plastic card.

In addition, while it’s obvious that any launch by Apple of a so-called iWatch would boost the whole mobile payments market, it’s unclear whether such a launch would require additional point-of-sale upgrades.