Over the past few years there’s been a trend of getting our plastic debit and credit cards onto smartphones. Manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung have brought out features for their line of handset which will grant users the ability to feature their personal debit card right on their device. Through consumers smartphones a bill can be paid off at the checkout just by waving their smartphone over the device that we normally swipe our debit cards through. While this trend is slowing catching on it still seems that Canada is far behind the United States in adopting this new method of paying for goods and services.
As mentioned, it was just a few years ago that we started to see manufacturers provide the functionality of using a smartphone to act as our debit and credit card. Luckily most of marketplaces and shops who allow consumers to swipe their plastic card to process a transaction also allow consumers to wave their handset for a mobile payment through Near Field Communication or otherwise known as NFC. A new survey went out that aimed to find out just how many consumers are using this new mobile payments method regularly and its results showed Canada is still behind the United States for adopters.
The survey was conducted of 4,000 smartphone users that live within the United States and Canada where it was discovered that Americans who use mobile payments weekly average to around 19%. Canada however is below the average of the United States coming in at only 11% of consumers who use mobile payments weekly. Through the same survey we also learn just how many consumers are even aware that mobile payments are a viable method to begin with.
Apparently from the reports 53% of United States consumers are aware that mobile payments are a functionality for their smartphone which is an improvement from the past year of around 43%. There’s even an improvement with Canadian consumers with this year being around 40% compared to 2014 where only about 35% of Canadians knew what mobile payments were about. While these numbers are slowly rising for both the United States and Canada, there’s a pretty big speculation as to why Canada seems so far behind and that’s through Apple Pay.
Apple Pay makes up 68% of Americans mobile payment and so far Apple has yet to make the service feature available within Canada. There’s a good chance that when Apple does make the service available within Canada we may see the number of consumers who know about mobile payments to even the consumers who use the feature rise immensely but this is purely speculative.