Report: Mobile Payments Surge, Banks Could Play Larger Role as Wallet Providers
Consumer adoption of mobile payments is on the upswing, according to a new report by First Annapolis Consulting, which found that 74 percent of respondents had made at least one mobile-based payment in the preceding 12 months—up significantly from just 40 percent a year earlier. The latest version of the consultancy’s semi-annual Study of Mobile Banking & Payments polled more than 1,500 U.S. consumers aged 18 to 54 who owned a smartphone, to gauge their attitudes about mobile banking and payments.
The steady growth in mobile payments adoption was among the study’s key findings. In-app or online purchases ranked as the most-common type of mobile payment, with 55 percent of respondents saying they’d made such a purchase using their phone over the previous 12 months, up from 23 percent in May 2015. Mobile bill payment came in just behind at 54 percent, double the 27 percent rate from the previous year. P2P money transfer (27 percent) and in-store payments (23 percent) were less common among respondents, but both payment types showed significant growth over the May 2015 study, when both came in at 13 percent.
More than half of respondents—51 percent—reported having a mobile wallet app on their phone, with Apple Pay the most common, at 36 percent. PayPal was next, at 21 percent, with Android Pay ranking third, with 15 percent. And although just 7 percent of mobile wallet owners used a bank-provided wallet, banks were by far consumers’ most-preferred wallet provider. Forty-five percent of respondents—40 percent of those who had a wallet app and 55 percent of those who didn’t—rated banks as the entity they’d most want to provide a wallet. Apple was a distant second, at 14 percent. The unmet demand for bank-provided mobile wallets means that banks “have the opportunity to play a much larger role in mobile payments than they do today,” the study noted.
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