Really? 8 Trillion Text Messages!

Dave Rudd

Ok, I’ll admit it, I’m fascinated by statics and random information. As a child, I frequently asked Santa to deliver the newest The Guinness Book of World Records to me on Christmas morning. I read that book for months!

I recently came across some mind-boggling statistics in an article on mobiThinking.com about the global mobile industry from 2011 I had to share. As you read these statistics, think about the ARM industry and how you might take advantage of this major shift in communicating and doing business. Remember, these stats are from 2011; projections for future years are out of this world!

• Mobile subscriptions:At the end of 2011, there were an estimated 6 billion mobile subscriptions.That is equivalent to 87 percent of the world population and a huge increase from 5.4 billion in 2010 and 4.7 billion mobile subscriptions in 2009.
• Mobile web usage: 1.2 billion active mobile-broadband subscriptions worldwide.
• Mobile Messaging: The king of mobile messaging, an estimated 8 trillion text messages were sent in 2011. Consumers are also embracing mobile email, instant messaging, and multi-media messaging.
• Application-to-person messaging: Totals for Automated text messages such as alerts from banks, offers from retailers, and m-tickets are expected to overtake person-to-person text messaging in 2016.
• Mobile Apps: More than 300,000 mobile apps had been developed in three+ years and apps had been downloaded 10.9 billion times. BUT, 1 in 4 mobile apps once downloaded are never used again.
• Paying by mobile (m-payments): M-payments will be worth US $240 billion in 2011 and could be over US $1 trillion by 2015.
• Financial Services Access: By 2015, between 500 million and 1 billion people will access financial services with a mobile device.
• Smartphone operating systems: In 2011, 48.8 percent of smartphones shipped with Google’s free Android operating system. Smartphones now outsell PCs.

The world is rapidly becoming more mobile.  In general, people are no longer afraid to conduct business, access bank accounts and even make payments via their mobile devices. Consumers will research your organization via apps they downloaded to their mobile device. Will they find you?

In the ARM industry, we need to think about, plan and chart a course to take advantage of the oncoming tsunami of mobile users and applications. Share your creative ideas on how mobile devices, apps and related technologies might be used to improve your debt collection efforts in coming years. I will compile a list of your ideas and share them in a future post.

Dave Rudd is DialerFan, a champion of the collection industry, focused on improving collection capabilities through technology and political action. He energetically participates in lobbying efforts for the industry through donations, writing letters, making phone calls, participating in seminars and attending events in Washington D.C., including the most recent ACA International Fly-In.

Well acquainted with debt collection, Dave spent two years debt collecting before joining IAT in 1990. He has held a variety of positions at IAT, a provider of collection-specific dialing technology, including President/CEO and most recently Senior VP of Finance & Administration.