An influential trade group today warned traditional banks that prepaid is likely to be the future engine behind mobile wallets.

Mobey Forum, the global trade group for mobile financial services, said in white paper released today that “the prepaid model has the potential to have a significant and negative impact on banks and financial institutions in the mobile ecosystem.”

Here’s how the white paper explains Mobey’s stance:

Mobey Forum sees the continuing advance of mobile payment services creating new opportunities for prepaid. But more than this, the proliferation of the prepaid model is also opening doors for mobile payment services, enabling innovative deployments by merchants and other stakeholders and encouraging wider spread user adoption as a result.

This advancement puts traditional financial services providers at a disadvantage, Mobey said.

Some prepaid providers are developing suites of financial services that seek to compete head to head with the current accounts of traditional banks. Should these services be rolled into a mobile wallet environment they will be exposed to customer demographic of predominantly affluent, technically curious, early adopter mobile wallet end users. Business won here is likely to be at the direct expense of the traditional banking industry.

Mobey cited AtB Mobillett, a two-year-old Android and iOS transit app in Norway, as a provider of prepaid via mobile wallets that is finding success. Mobey indicated that “the number of [AtB] users continues to grow as awareness of the product increases. In 2013 3.2 million mobile tickets were issued via the solution, 40% of these were charged to the user’s phone bill and 57% were settled using the prepaid account.”

Mobey counts nearly 50 companies as members, including US Bank, Bank of America, Fiserv, and Visa.