Participan
ts 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.
