Monitise, one of the world’s leading providers of mobile banking technology, expects to see 200 million users of its mobile banking platform by 2018, up from 30 million today.

In a call with investors last week, CEO Alastair Lukes described a world where telcos, retailers and banks form a triangle in defending themselves and each other from threats to their businesses. Mobile commerce, Lukes says, is “the glue between three industries that need to work together.”

He also said many banks are making mobile the central channel for the company. “Many of you would have seen some of the statistics coming out from some of the banks that we provide services for today who are literally recreating their entire businesses around mobile,” he said.

Lukes said the company is gaining roughly 500,000 users a month, and estimated 200 million users by 2018 up from 30 million today. It doesn’t take a mathematician to see these numbers don’t quite add up, and one investor described the number as “aspirational.” Still, Lukes described a “societal shift” to mobile from cards and how that puts 200 million well within the company’s reach:

So I think a bank with 10 million users, two cards per person [that’s] 20 million cards. If we can go for one app per person and that’s essentially the addressable market, the 10 million. If half their customers end up using mobile by 2018, there is 5 million users, straight forward as that.

He also sees Monitise’s existing bank customers “making the journey to m-commerce pretty quickly over the course of the next 6 months to 12 months.”

Lukes used an interesting term in regard to banks, saying that the bank will be “your front screen app.” That may be the modern equivalent of “top-of-wallet.”