Tag: mobile transactions

US and UK markets see mobile payments transactions rising

| February 1, 2016

While people are using smartphone based wallets more often, it doesn’t appear to be reducing cash use.

According to the most recent digital money index issued by Citigroup in partnership with the Imperial College of London, mobile payments are rapidly becoming more popular in the United States and the United Kingdom, but the least developed countries worldwide aren’t able to use this technology to reduce the use of cash and checks every year.

The hope has been to replace cash and checks with mobile transactions because of the cost reduction.

Transactions in the form of cash and checks cost billions of dollars to maintain every year, which explains why developing nations are placing a considerable focus on mobile payments. The hope is that they will replace a large portion of the use of cash and checks; and the costs associated with those transactions. However, while mobile wallets are becoming increasingly popular in the U.S. and the U.K., they’re not having the desired impact on cash and check use in the developing world.

The report showed that there is a growing gap between the countries that are most and least ready for mobile payments.

US & UK Mobile Payments Market GrowingAccording to Sandeep Dave, the head of global digital strategy at Citigroup, “What we found this year is actually pretty stark.” He explained that “The incipient countries that have a long way to go, they almost showed a zero improvement against 2014 scores [while] the materially ready countries showed the most improvement.”

At the highest end of the index, Finland has found itself in the top spot for the third year in a row. Singapore is in second place, followed by the United States. The United Kingdom jumped upward in the index by three places in 2015 when compared to its position in 2014. This brought the U.K. to the fourth spot in the most recent index.

Mr. Dave underscored the fact that, as a whole, progress was not rapid in 2015 in terms of the adoption of mobile payments in favor of cash and checks. He stated that the most recent research from the firm indicated that the primary barrier to the use of the digital transactions was consumer attitudes as the tech, market support and digital money products and wallet apps are all essentially available where they need to be.

One in three online transactions in Q4 2015 were mobile payments

| January 29, 2016

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.

Q4 2015 - Mobile PaymentsIn 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.”