Europeans are embracing mobile money in a big way, suggest findings from Visa’s latest annual Digital Payments Study.
The study was conducted by Populus on Visa’s behalf between June and July of this year, with a little over 42,000 respondents surveyed across Europe. Sixty-two percent of respondents said they access banking services or check balances via mobile app, reflecting a huge jump from the 29 percent who said they had a mobile banking app in 2015. Meanwhile, the number of respondents who said they’d used a digital wallet like PayPal or Apple Pay rose from 63 percent last year to 68 percent this year, and 45 percent reported sending money to friends or family via mobile device — suggesting a healthy appetite for the forthcoming Apple Pay Cash and similar P2P payment services.
Also important: Enthusiasm for biometric security is going up, and concerns about security are going down. Eighty-four percent expressed confidence in biometric security, compared to only 59 percent in 2016; and concerns about security dropped from 65 percent last year to 59 percent this year. It’s a fair bet that the two are trends are correlated, given that biometric security is increasingly used as a selling point for mobile wallet and payment service providers seeking to reassure consumers that their services are safe to use; and such trends could be strengthened by the emergence of newer, more sophisticated biometric systems like the iPhone X’s Face ID.
And given the demographics behind the data, these trends appear likely to continue. Millennials are leading the adoption of digital payments, with 86 percent identifying as “Mobile Money users”, and 92 percent said they expect to be “Mobile Money users” within the next three years. They’re also ahead of the pack in mobile banking and mobile P2P transfers, of course — all of which suggests that the future of money in Europe is mobile.
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