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Millennials Represent a Risky Reward for Mobile Payments

June 16, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

The millennial generation—whose exact numbers for qualification seem to vary depending on who one talks to—represents both major opportunity and potential disaster for mobile payments companies.

Familiar with technology, frequently unable to remember life without the Internet, and used to a way of life beyond the reckoning of most baby boomers, they’re coming into their own, with a whole new set of expectations, philosophies, and disposable income.

So how does one tap that market? It’s a risky proposition, but one companies must follow to win.

Despite widespread use of mobile devices—86 percent of customers in a TransUnion survey note that they store bank account information on smartphones, and 84 percent have reported checking account balances and the like—fewer take security seriously.

Sixty-seven percent of users don’t use password protection on mobile devices, a development that should leave most anyone unnerved.

This suggests that the millennials aren’t so concerned about safety, believing it to be someone else’s problem, particularly the banks and retailers whose platforms the millennials use.

Any breach from there, meanwhile, will be met with no small share of consumer outcry and lost customers. So while businesses may not believe that security is their responsibility, failure to adopt such a philosophy is likely to end with customers rushing for the door.

Whether it’s right or wrong really doesn’t matter here. What matters is that this is what a lot of millennials think to be true, so failure to operate accordingly opens up the potential for loss.

With millennials set to be the next big thing in retail, with all the disposable income that Generation X had maybe 10 years ago, accommodating millennials’ ideas will be vital to keeping them as customers.

This makes it, as the headline noted, risky with a chance for big reward. To offer powerful security that doesn’t depend on the user is vital to keeping the millennial buyer, and thanks to the growth of biometrics, we may well have such a plan on hand.

Millennial customers need strong yet non-intrusive security measures in order to keep them buying and happy.

With that kind of market at stake, there’s little to do but shrug and carry on, offering the best in security to users who expect it as a given, sufficiently so that they’ll take little action on their own part to protect themselves.