There were multiple announcements which came from Google last week during the company’s annual I/O developer conference, however one of them in particular had direct resonance with the UK market. This was the news that Android Pay was finally launching in the UK. Which, if recent figures from a report by Payments UK are anything to go by, could not be better timing. The report details how 2015 saw the UK take significant strides to becoming much more reliant on contactless payments.
One of the big headline points from the report is that 2015 was the first year in which the UK saw more purchases being made using contactless forms of payments then it did with cash. Specifically, the report details that 2015, total cash payments represented 45.1-percent of payments overall. Which is a significant drop from 10 years before where cash payments in 2005 totaled 64-percent of all payments. This is trend which analysts clearly expect to continue with cash payments expected to drop close to the 25-percent level within the next 10 years. While these figures are quite wide-ranging as they span 10 years, the report also details that the number of contactless payments registered in 2015 was 3.3 times higher compared to the year before. Again, an increase which seems to be taken place again this year, with the first few months of 2016 already beginning to show an increase on last years figures.
Of course, these figures are all in the absence of the newest forms of mobile payments like Android Pay. However, that is what makes the report overall so compelling as the UK seems to be a market which is primed for the use of Android Pay and the other options (including those from the likes of Barclays) which will be arriving over the next year. As a result, the figures for the next year or two will be extremely interesting as mobile payments are only likely to gain in their popularity and adoption and could quite easily be another accelerator which brings the UK closer to becoming a contactless society altogether. In the meantime though, those interested in reading the full report from Payments UK, can do so by heading through the source link below.