It’s not that contactless hasn’t been popular anywhere, Paygilant asserts. The UK loves it, with 54 percent of those studied in a recent survey having put contactless to use in the last month. By comparison, in that same month, just three percent of Americans could say likewise. Canada, meanwhile, seems to be following its elder brother into the fray; 58 percent of Canadian consumers had tried contactless in 2017, and 19 percent regularly use it. That’s better than six times the number that even used it last month in the US.
One of the biggest reasons for the US’ lag, Paygilant suggests, is that the American market just hasn’t seen the benefits of contactless, or mobile payments, yet. Without a strong, clear value proposition, there’s just not much reason to make the switch from cash, card, or anything else being used. An overall conservative spirit of technological adoption—especially when it comes to financial technology—is also cited by some.
Potential mobile payments users in America have long had a major problem with security, and that’s kept a lot of users out of the fold. While this has been a great step forward, it immediately segued into a new problem, the sheer “why” of mobile payments. We’ve already seen this happen, and we’ve even seen some companies beat this problem outright thanks to the addition of rewards programs to a mobile payments system. Starbucks especially put such a system to good use, and has seen it succeed so thoroughly that it actually hurt business for a while by causing bottlenecks at the counter.
We can never ignore mobile payments security. We must, however, also emphasize the value of mobile payments if we expect customers to pick it up. Some have already seen the value. For those who haven’t, addressing this will be vital to building adoption rates.