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Ready to leave your wallet at home and use your mobile phone to pay for everything? Most of us still need the reassurance of cash and cards for now. However, there is little doubt that mobile payments will take off.

Consumers own more smart devices than ever before and PC sales have been in steady decline for years. Recent research from Gartner predicts that tablet sales alone will overtake PC sales in 2015, when there will be nearly 321 million tablets shipped, versus 317 million PCs. As consumers use smart devices for work and play, inevitably they will use them to pay too. Big businesses – banks, retailers and technology providers – as well as a host of start-up players are looking to grab a slice of this frontier economy that is set to explode.

While everybody can agree that mobile payments will be big, defining what mobile payments are and what the market will look like is much more difficult.

Are mobile payments about tapping your mobile phone on a terminal at the supermarket like you do with a debit card? Is it when you send a friend money via text message? What about just buying something using an app on your phone? What’s the difference between all these things?

In an effort to clarify, I’ve outlined what I believe is the best way to break down the different categories of mobile payments.

Mobile-point-of-sale

Mobile-point-of-sale (mPOS) allows merchants and business, both large and small, to accept card payments using a smart phone or tablet, rather than a traditional ‘fixed’ point-of-sale (POS) terminal. There are a number of ways that MPOS can be enabled, but most often it’s via a ‘plug-in’ card reader or a “sled” device that the mobile phone fits into. This is then combined with a mobile app that often have interfaces resembling traditional cash registers.

Proximity mobile payments

Probably the most hyped category of mobile payments, proximity payments let consumers use their mobile phone to pay at a venue – in-store, at a train station or even directly from advertising. The most well-known type is Near Field Communication (NFC) payments which allow consumers to tap their NFC-enabled smart device on a compliant terminal to make a purchase.