The Gig Economy Increasingly Turns to Mobile Payments

A lot of people just think of mobile payments as a business-to-consumer (B2C) application, where people pay businesses for goods and services using a mobile wallet program. Sure, the size of the B in question varies from massive corporation to farmers’ market booth, but it’s still generally the same application. We seldom think of mobile payments as a business-to-business (B2B) application, but the same principles that let us buy a sandwich or coffee could well pay wages one day. The gig economy, increasingly, is finding this true.

The numbers support this projection surprisingly well; not only is the gig economy growing—54 percent of gig workers were hired not to fill temporary staffing issues, but rather to supplement a skills or knowledge gap on a more permanent basis—but the payment methods aren’t really growing with it.

Just 18.4 percent of gig workers were actually paid by the digital platforms that handled their leads, and since gig workers are expected to pull in a combined $1.4 trillion just this year, that’s a whole lot of room for someone to step in.

Gig workers are paid in five ways. Forty percent are paid by mailed check, while 39 percent are paid in cash outright. Direct deposit kicks in 34 percent, while PayPal contributes 32 percent. All fairly close together, and there’s some overlap here.

But the real shock: 84 percent of gig workers would actually do more gig work if they were paid faster, meaning that there’s something of a bottleneck out there that mobile payments could address.

While there may not necessarily be that much more gig work out there needing done—though there do seem to be new positions opening up almost every weekday—it does represent one doozy of an opportunity for mobile payments firms to step in. That kind of money going through the system is hard to pass up, and even small fractions of it would be enough to make someone a very big business.

Becoming the new payment standard of the gig economy, however, would be a challenge. Given how many businesses are still paying by cash or check, convincing them to turn to mobile payments would be a tall order. Still, for the business that can pull it off, almost unimaginable rewards await