One in Six South Koreans Turn to Mobile Payments

It’s easy to see mobile payments as a strictly American technology, but the good news is that this is a phenomenon catching on worldwide.

In South Korea, where online access can get downright impressive in terms of speeds and bandwidth, mobile payments are a big part of life. How big? A new report from the Bank of Korea suggests that one in six South Koreans have recently used mobile payments.

Of that one in six, there’s plenty of variation in terms of overall use. The most common is once to three times a month, as 44 percent of respondents put their use level around there. Meanwhile, 23 percent used it less than once a month, while another 23 percent put services to use once or twice a week.

With this in mind, the Bank of Korea offered a fairly simple bit of advice to those involved in mobile payments: improving overall mobile banking operations would likely pay substantial dividends. The biggest points of focus for improvement? The usual suspects: security and reliability.

It’s good to see that that last is such a common point; people want mobile payment platforms that are both secure and reliable. That’s not really a surprise; when it comes to people’s money, it should be safe and it should be reliable.

The fact that it’s so universally a concern among users that two different user populations on the other side of the planet would find equally concerning, meanwhile, is what’s noteworthy here. The old scolds about making more secure mobile payments options, and improving the reliability of these systems to work anywhere, seems less like a cliché when surveys like this come out and demonstrate that’s what people want.

Thankfully, the warnings aren’t falling on deaf ears. Security on the hardware and software level alike is already pretty strong, and there are many more advancements coming out on a regular basis. The market is speaking, and it’s clear that those who want in on the market are responding.

Those who do the best job of providing are likely to come out ahead in the end, and given how competitive the market already is, security and reliability will end up table stakes before much longer.