Tag: mobile payments technology

The 2016 Digital Payments Study showed a rapidly rising number of consumers using smartphones to pay.

The 2016 Digital Payments Study from Visa revealed insight into European mobile payments trends. It showed that there has been a spike in the number of people using smartphones as wallets. In fact, the number of people using this type of transaction has tripled since 2015.

At the time of the research, 54 percent of consumers were using mobile payments on a regular basis.

The research indicated that European mobile payments were regularly used by over half of consumers. Comparatively, at the same time the year before, only 18 percent of consumers were using mobile wallets to pay for goods and services.

This research involved the participation of over 36,000 online consumers in Europe. They resided in any of 19 different countries in the continent. The study showed a dramatic shift in the use of mobile payments technology over the prior 12 months.

The European mobile payments research also indicated that more people are open to trying the tech.

Last year at the same time, 38 percent of respondents had never used mobile payments and had no intention of ever trying it. This year’s figure has dropped to 12 percent. Clearly, far more people are interested in trying the use of mobile devices to pay for products and services.

There were two countries in which it was most obvious that there was a very large increase in mobile wallet use and interest. These two countries were Turkey and Romania. They have been adopting this technology at a staggering rate.

That said, the United Kingdom stood out as a market where there was a very large percentage of smartphone users who also used mobile payments. In the U.K., 74 percent of device owners had tried mobile wallets. Over half of the people who had tried the tech (59%) had done so to transfer money to friends and family. Slightly fewer (45 percent) had used it for purchasing take-out at restaurants.

A new trend in European mobile payments has also started to develop. Within it, consumers have revealed that they are increasingly comfortable in using their mobile devices to make more expensive purchases.

The South Korean consumer electronics manufacturer is taking its mobile payments system into more countries.

Samsung Pay, the mobile payments system that uses NFC technology through the devices from the South Korean tech giant, will now be headed into a broader range of countries across the globe, expanding it well beyond its very limited initial release.

The mobile wallet will be available to consumers throughout a handful of additional countries worldwide.

In a recent tweet, Samsung expressed that while the NFC technology based mobile wallet is already available in the United States and South Korea, it will become available to millions of additional customers in the very near future. This is because it will be stepping into at least three new countries in the near future. The countries that have been identified, so far, include Australia, Singapore and Brazil. This will more than double the number of countries in which the service is available and will provide the company with a considerably larger opportunity to boost its user base.

Samsung followed up the expansion announcement of its NFC technology mobile wallet with more at CES 2016.

At the Consumer Electronics Show 2016, which was held last week in Las Vegas, Samsung also unveiled a new line of NFC enabled smartwatches which would be compatible with its Samsung Pay service. This means that people won’t be limited to smartphones when they want to use mobile devices to pay for their products and service at checkout counters across the new range of countries where it will be available.

The Gear S2 smartwatch will have the mobile technology needed to be able to be used for contactless payments at points of sale that have NFC readers. Upon the initial release of the wearable technology devices, the Samsung Pay service will still be available only in South Korea and the United States. However, as the expansion of the service occurs later in 2016, it is likely that these gadgets will be able to be used there, as well.

This represents a growing trend of wearable technology devices that are becoming compatible with mobile payments. The use of NFC technology in the Gear S2 could help to push forward the adoption of both mobile payments and wearables, simultaneously, if Samsung is as successful as it hopes to be.