We're looking for the best sources to answer the following questions re: contactless payments in the US market - your suggestions are welcome!

• Acceptance - How many POS acceptance locations in the US have been upgraded to support contactless? What has been the ramp to get to today? What is the forecast for the next 3 years?
• Transactions - What has been the transaction growth of contactless payments over the last 3 years? What is the forecast for the next 3 years? Is there evidence that contactless cards migrate to being preferred as the "top of wallet" payment card?
• Issuance - How many contactless payment (credit and debit) cards have been issued in the US? What is the forecasted number of contactless payment cards in the market by 2012?

We're aware of the excellent contactless resources already available in the Smart Card Alliance's Contactless and Mobile Payments Council website - are there others? Let us know and we'll share a summary here.

In a press release titled "ClairMail Powers Mobile Banking for State Bank & Trust", ClairMail provided some insight into consumer use of mobile banking:

The ClairMail System is seeing tremendous adoption and continued growth, with over 12 mobile banking transactions conducted every month per consumer. This is more than three times greater than the monthly transactions per consumer found in published reports from other mobile banking solutions. Moreover, ClairMail customers have seen upwards of 25 percent adoption by online banking consumers, shattering industry averages which are less than 3 percent.

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for December, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $343.2 billion, a decrease of 2.7 percent (±0.5%) from the previous month and 9.8 percent (±0.7%) below December 2007. Total sales for the 12 months of 2008 were down 0.1 percent (±0.4%)* from 2007. Total sales for the October through December 2008 period were down 7.7 percent (±0.5%) from the same period a year ago. The October to November 2008 percent change was revised from -1.8 percent (±0.5%) to -2.1 percent (±0.3%).

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