PwC Study Shows Huge Distrust for Mobile Payments in Germany

A strange new development has recently cropped up in Germany, regarded by many to be the powerhouse of the European economy.

Recent studies from Bitkom found that while just shy of one in three Germans—29 percent—were open to the idea of using a smartphone to pay for purchases, a very large number of Germans don’t actually trust mobile payments to be safe.

New reports from auditing company PwC show that 88 percent of Germans are concerned about security in mobile payments.

More specifically, that 88 percent are concerned about data being not only stolen but misused during the use of mobile payment activity.

That’s a huge blow to the very concept of mobile payments in a major economy, but it only gets worse. 85 percent believe that using mobile payments systems increases the likelihood of a phone being stolen with the payment data contained therein being used as part of criminal activity.

72 percent believe that mobile payment systems in general tempt people to shop faster.

Perhaps the topper of this study is the two-fold proposition: despite about a third of people being interested from that Bitkom study, the PwC study shows 75 percent have never used mobile payments, and 40 percent have absolutely no plan to do so in the future.

That’s a big chunk of the market that’s just voluntarily removed itself from consideration, and in a major economy like Germany, a major loss indeed.

But thankfully, there’s a silver lining in this dark cloud: the problem preventing many users from turning to mobile is fairly universal-security.

This is the perfect time for mobile payment operators to make a case to the German people in as simple and straightforward a fashion as possible: mobile payments are safe. Show how data is protected, and then show how the user is protected if something should go wrong. Show how payments made with misappropriated data simply aren’t honored, and the actual owner of the data isn’t held responsible. There are a lot of possibilities, and it’s made much easier by the fact that everyone seems to have something at least close to the same complaint.

When 88 percent of a study’s respondents are all worried about hackers, either most everybody is, or this study managed to get the handful of fusspots concerned about such things. Since the former is more likely than the latter, altering the marketing message to focus on security should have a great impact on overall mood.