Participants in an online survey reveal that they believe a cashless future is on the way.
Harris Interactive has released the results of its most recent survey, which has indicated that among adults in the United States, well over half believe that mobile payments will replace both cash and credit card based transactions at some point down the road.
Over 30 percent of the respondents said that the replacement would occur in five years from now.
The survey was performed online from November 14 through 19, with the participation of 2,383 respondents. Each were adults and they all lived in the U.S. When asked about the replacement of credit cards with mobile payments, the 66 percent believed that this would one day occur. That said, only 32 percent of the participants felt that this would occur within the next half decade.
The mobile payments survey also looked into the replacement of cash with smartphones.
The results of the poll showed that the participants felt nearly the same way about cash as they did about credit cards in terms of their replacement by mobile payments technology. In fact, 61 percent of the respondents said that they felt that one day, we would no longer use cash because of our smartphone devices. However, only 26 percent believed that this will have happened in five years’ time.
The survey findings identified several different reasons that can explain the hesitation that consumers have regarding the use of mobile payments transactions. These can help to explain why adoption of the technology has been as slow as it has.
The survey presented the participants with a number of different reasons from which they could choose, in order to explain why they would hesitate to use mobile payments for making purchases. The answers included – but are not limited to – the following:
• Over half (52 percent) are content with their credit cards and/or cash so they don’t see a need to change.
• 51 percent expressed concerns over mobile security in terms of financial and private data.
• Half didn’t own a smartphone.
• 40 percent didn’t trust the security of entering mobile payments information into a merchant’s device.
Customer data gives merchants the ability to make their promotions and offers geographically relevant.
The use of smartphones and geolocation technology is giving retailers an entirely new angle for leveraging the geographical data of consumers so that they can provide them with marketing that will be more applicable to their unique wants and needs.
As mobile device penetration continues to increase, the opportunities for merchants are rapidly expanding.
An ever growing number of consumers is carrying smartphones wherever they go, which is providing retailers with geolocation data that has never been available to them at any other moment in history. However, aside from making it easier to actually reach those customers, these devices are also giving a potentially critical piece of information to companies about their customers and potential shoppers: their actual location.
A McKinsey Big Data report identified some of the larger potential benefits of geolocation.
That mobile marketing report indicated that over the next ten years, geolocation data will have the capability to form a massive $100 billion merely in the value that it offers service providers. An MIT Sloan Management Review editor named Renee Boucher Fergunson, who is also a researcher, explained that “geography is making a comeback.”
The latest in geolocation technologies is giving companies the opportunity to obtain vital data about their consumers, no matter where they may be. This, according to the SAP Retail program principal, Colin Haig. The NGDATA CEO, Luc Burgelman, expanded on this concept by saying that the pressure that retailers are currently facing in order to define themselves as unique within the marketplace is leaning increasingly toward methods that are geographically relevant.
That said, as is the case with other forms of data collection, retailers are being cautioned not to cross a certain line with geolocation techniques, and to steer clear of behaviors that could label them as having a Big Brother style agenda. It is important to collect this mobile commerce data, without overstepping boundaries that would lead consumers to feel that their trust has been abused. The result would only be negative as customers take specific actions to protect their information and block a specific company from being able to access it.
