A couple of years ago, my wife and I took a trip to St. Louis, Missouri. Jen and I drove more than a thousand miles, spent six nights in a hotel, ate however many meals and did some shopping. We each have a debit card, a credit card and a gas card, and Jen has a few store cards. We were gone a week, and I came home with the same ten $50 bills I’d gotten at the bank before we left.

It dawned on me how seldom I have any physical currency in my wallet — usually only when I travel. It’s certainly not because I go without any of the things I need or want; it’s because I simply don’t need to carry cash.

#-ad_banner-#I do, of course, need my smartphone. And thanks to what may experts are calling the “mobile payment revolution,” it’s quickly becoming “the next big thing” that will lead to the death of debit cards and cash.

For the past few years, I’ve been telling readers of my premium Game-Changing Stocks Advisory about mobile payments. In fact, well before Apple announced its Apple Pay platform, I predicted that the company would develop this technology. And while I coined the phrase “iCash” at the time (OK, I was a little off on the name), I knew this was going to become what my subscribers and I refer to as “the next big thing” that leads to fantastic returns for investors.

How did I see this coming? Simple: It’s my job.

It’s revolutionary concepts like these that I profile regularly in my Game-Changing Stocks advisory. My job as Chief Investment Strategist is to help my readers find the stocks that are primed to change the baseline assumptions for an industry, potentially changing the way we live our lives — and deliver triple-digit growth potential in the process.

To identify these groundbreaking concepts you have to be forward thinking… and you have to go out on a limb.

— Who would have thought 10 years ago most of us would have tiny computers in our pocket or purse at nearly every waking moment? Then Blackberry and Apple came to the party and smartphones have caught on like wildfire, making enormous sums of money for early investors.

— Would you have believed a decade ago that Blockbuster would now be bankrupt? And that it would be done by a tiny upstart called Netflix that delivered movies via mail and later stream movies over the Internet, allowing anyone with an Internet connection to watch a movie without leaving the house?

I could go on for pages. But the important point is that I’d bet you wouldn’t have thought half of these ideas were possible a little more than a decade ago. That’s why to find the most lucrative potential investments, you must have an open mind.

I think Apple, Google and other tech giants are onto something big with mobile payments. But the simple fact is that their days of heady gains are largely in the rearview mirror. That’s why none of these stocks are my top picks for mobile payments technology. Instead, one top winner is a little-known company I’ve been telling my readers about for years: NXP Semiconductors (Nasdaq: NXPI).

If you’re a longtime StreetAuthority reader, then you’ve heard me talk about this company before. In fact, my Game-Changing Stocks readers have been profiting from it since June of 2012. 

As you can see from the chart above, I first recommended NXP at $23.57. Since then, it’s returned more than 200%.

NXP builds the special near-field communications chips that allow phones and mobile devices to transmit purchase information securely. Keep in mind, this is a company that’s also developing a lot of other smart, game-changing technology. In fact, it holds the No. 1 or No. 2 rank in all the other industries in which it competes. The company offers a vast patent portfolio. It owns the intelligence at the edge of the network, and is poised to profit from its discoveries for years, either by manufacturing itself or by licensing the technology to others.

Bottom line, mobile payments is an impending revolution in how the world transacts business. And when I say “the world” I mean “the world.” This is a technology deployable not only in rich Western countries but also in Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East, potentially attracting not only wealthy U.S. and European iPhone and Android aficionados, but also billions of unbanked customers doing trillions of dollars in business.

In fact, there are so many possibilities with this technology, it’s simply too much to cover in one issue. And while my subscribers and I have made some fantastic gains with this stock, I think there’s still room to run. 

P.S. The mainstream media doesn’t cover groundbreaking opportunities like mobile payments — that is, until it’s too late. They’ll tell you all about a discovery once it comes out — but they don’t look ahead to see where the next one is coming from.

There are plenty more innovative ideas we’ve been uncovering in Game-Changing Stocks — including trends with the potential to revolutionize our lives that hold the potential for early investors make a killing. In fact, I’ve just released a new report on the 11 ways to potentially triple your money from Apple’s next big market disruption. To learn more about these game changers before the rest of the crowd finds them, follow this link.