Report highlights the growing power of mobile payments

The popularity of mobile payments is growing in the United Kingdom and the United States. Citigroup and the Imperial College of London have released a new report shows that consumers in many countries are beginning to favor mobile payments when they shop digitally. This is particularly true in the U.S. and the UK, as more consumers are beginning to use their mobile devices to purchase products online. As such, they are becoming increasingly reliant on new payment services that allow them to make purchases online and in physical stores.

Consumer attitudes are affecting the adoption of new payment services

While more consumers have been opting to use their mobile devices to make payments, adoption of mobile commerce has been slow in 2015 overall. Consumer attitudes kept many people from making use of mobile payments services and these attitudes were swayed by security concerns. Many believe that their personal information is at risk when they use new payment platforms, which leads them to avoid mobile payments altogether. the report also suggests that there is a culture barrier preventing the widespread adoption of mobile payments.

UK banks are finding success with their own payment platforms

Banks in the United Kingdom have reported a surge in the adoption of new mobile payments service over the past few years. Barclays has its own mobile platform, called Pingit, which now accounts for 1 million transactions as of January of this year. This is an increase over the 100,000 transactions it had been responsible for only one year ago. Payment services in the U.S. have seen similar growth, especially due to the availability of new services like Apple Pay and Android Pay.

Consumers want more security from their mobile payments services

The mobile payments sector is still considered quite young. As such, there is room for growth in its various aspects. For consumers, security remains one of the most important priorities. If services cannot protect their financial information, consumers are unlikely to make use of them. These consumers also want more value added to the mobile payments services they are interested in. This may be accomplished through stronger support for loyalty programs.

The Adyen research firm has now released their figures which showed smartphones surpassed tablets in m-payments.

For the first time in the history of mobile payments, the last quarter of 2015 represented the time when smartphones were used more often than tablets for the completion of transactions that were made online.

At the same time, it remained iPads that were able to bring in the largest average transaction value.

The figures from Adyen, a research company, have also revealed that in the last three months of 2015, one in three online transactions were carried out in the form of mobile payments. The purchases were made either by way of a smartphone or a tablet. More specifically, 34 percent of online transactions during the last quarter of 2015 were completed over mobile. This was a solid increase over the third quarter of last year, when that figure had been 30 percent.

Mobile payments are currently divided nearly equally between smartphones and tablets, though phones are growing.

In the worldwide scene, smartphones are being used for 17.5 percent of all purchase transactions completed online. This is an increase over the previous quarter, when it had been 14 percent. Comparatively, tablets were used 16 percent of the time, which is a decrease when compared to the quarter before, when it had been 17 percent.

What Adven determined was that even though smartphones were rising in popularity, it remained iPads that were being used for the transactions that had the highest overall total value. The average order value over iPads was $107. In second place – and only very slightly behind iPads – were orders made over laptops and PCs, as their average order value was $106. Android tablets took third place with $86, iPhones were in fourth place at $83 and, finally, Android smartphones had an average total purchase value of $73.

According to Roelant Prins, the chief commerce officer at Adven, in a recent statement, “Mobile payments, both in app and browser-based, are driving the growth of eCommerce, and this trend is particularly noticeable by the acceleration in mobile payments for methods such as JCB and Alipay.”