P2P Payments in 2015: Market Sizing and Evaluation of P2P

The market for person-to-person (P2P) payments continues to grow and evolve as new technologies, new vendors, and new capabilities stream into our daily lives, providing consumers with a dazzling array of options for sending money to other people for whatever reason they need. Consumers can send money from a variety of physical and digital locations, which include banks, money transmitters, and social media companies, for a variety of reasons: Money can be sent using a mobile phone from a social network to a colleague sitting across a restaurant table.  P2P can also be used by a parent sending money from his laptop via a money transmitter agent location for a child at college across the country for textbooks. No segment of the population is untouched by P2P services. The myriad methods, transfer speeds, and costs are continuing to change for the consumer’s benefit.

In this report, Javelin examines the overall P2P market, including the various channel segments driving the overall market growth, and the market sizing. The report also reviews the consumer segment power users of P2P and their preferred channel and provides additional perspective on the A2A, or “me to me,” money transfer market.

Additional vendor profiles have been added that are not covered in the Mobile P2P report issued in September 2015, Mobile P2P Payments in 2015: The Growth and Adoption of Mobile Money Transfers.  

Key questions this report will address:

• What types of electronic channels do consumers use to make P2P transfers? 
• What is the market sizing — including adoption and total dollars transferred — for each of the transfer channels? How large is the A2A electronic transfer market?
• What channel options are most commonly used?
• Are there channel preferences by age or bank customer segment types?
• Who are the power users of P2P?
• How are P2P services used when offered by banks, compared to non-banks, such as Venmo?

The consumer data in this report are based primarily on information gathered from multiple Javelin surveys conducted in 2014 and 2015. Data was gathered and weighted to reflect a representative sample of U.S. adult consumers.

• A random-sample panel of 3,225 consumers in a June/July 2014 survey. The margin of sampling error is ±1.73 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
• A random-sample panel of 3,000 consumers in a September 2015 survey. The margin of sampling error is ±1.79 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
• A random-sample panel of 3,200 consumers in in an October 2015 survey. The margin of sampling error is ±1.73 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.