Internet Trends 2019 by Mary Meeker
Bond Capital is Mary Meeker's new VC firm.

Bond Capital founder, VC investor, and technology analyst Mary Meeker is well-regarded for her annual internet trends reports. We’ll ignore whether a 333-slide presentation is good communications or smart presentation strategy, but there is something for everyone in her analyses and we’ve got a quick look at what matters to the payments industry.

12 key internet trends

Mary Meeker is founder of Bond Capital
Mary Meeker

Here are 12 highlights of the Internet Trends 2019 report by Meeker that payments industry people will want to note:

  • 3.8 billion users are now on the internet, 51% of the world’s population; new growth will get harder to find
  • e-commerce continues to grow, but growth is slowing
  • new types of innovation and monetization abound, especially in digital video, voice, wearables, on-demand services, localization, and underserved markets
  • outside of the US growth is faster in data-driven/direct fulfillment and financial services
  • customer acquisition costs are increasing
  • big data is a positive factor in innovation and business growth
  • consumers, businesses and regulators are overwhelmed by data
  • consumer internet usage may be decelerating
  • social media amplification, action/reaction occur at breathtaking speed with positive and negative results
  • cyber-attacks are more prevalent, more challenging, and have bigger impact
  • the internet and on-demand services increasingly impact employment, education, and healthcare
  • China is the biggest internet user market and a growing leader in innovation and scale.

What matters to the payments industry?

global payments roundup

Here’s a collection of facts and figures from Meeker’s trends report that will be of strong interest to the payments industry:

  • E-commerce sales are approaching 20% (15% in the US), while year-over-year growth has slowed to 10% in 2018 (slide 18)
  • the cost per acquisition of new customers exceeded lifetime value (slide 28)
  • freemium options are one possible solution to customer acquisition and conversion (slides 32-33, 100-103, 106-112)
  • average US consumer spends 6.3 hours online daily (slide 41)
  • number of wearables users hit 52 million – double in the past five years (slide 52)
  • SE Asia e-commerce growth is unabated (slides 53-62)
  • Alipay and subsidiary Ant Financial have 1 billion+ users globally; doubled in two years (slide 64); 300 million active daily users (slide 320)
  • South Korea digital payments users doubled in the past two years to 12 million (slide 66)
  • in Europe, Revolut doubled its number of users to 4 million in the past 10 months (slide 67)
  • in Brazil, digital bank Nubank’s users doubled to 9 million in one year (slide 68)
  • in Latin America, MercadoLibre processed 389 million e-commerce transactions in the past two years (slide 69)
  • 59% of payments were digital (slide 120)
  • data = personalized experiences = growth; 91% of consumers prefer brands that provide personalized offers/experiences; 83% will passively share data in exchange for personalized experiences; 74% will actively share data in exchange for personalized experiences (slide 148)
  • 447 million personal data records exposed in security breaches in 2018 (slide 210)
Mary Meeker Internet Trends 2019

Last year, Mary Meeker left Kleiner Perkins to start her own firm called Bond Capital, which has raised more than $1.25 billion for technology investments to date. If you’ve got a large cup of coffee or glass of wine ready, you can view Mary Meeker’s complete 333-slide Internet Trends 2019 presentation here.

Mary Meeker photo courtesy of Wikipedia