Consumer Intelligence: Brits Increasingly Turning to Cash in Mobile Payments Outages

August 13, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

Mobile payments can be a wonderful thing. They’re convenient, they can help keep records on hand, they can even offer a note of security, being able to shut down when a mobile device does if that device is lost or stolen. Relying on mobile payments alone, though, does leave a person a bit vulnerable in the event of a bank failure, power outage or similar glitch in our modern landscape. Thus, a report from Consumer Intelligence (CI) will come as little shock: Brits are increasingly embracing cash as a backup mechanism and carrying it with them.

The CI study found that just over one in four—27 percent—Brits are carrying more cash after being hit with an online banking outage. Some are also doing it out of “awareness of recent outages on card networks.” The average Brit is also being a lot more careful vis-a-vis data; 82 percent are watching said data just a little more closely than ever. However, the impact of this is somewhat limited; 23 percent admitted to only changing their password once a year or less, and 32 percent never actually change passwords.

Andy Buller, CI’s key account director, noted “As customers we can blame the banks for issues and data breaches, but many of us leave ourselves open to issues by not changing passwords regularly and using the same password across all accounts. Once a hacker has one password they have access to all your accounts.”

This is easy for Buller to say, but smacks of blaming the victim. If the breaches never happened, passwords could stay stagnant for years. Yes, once a hacker has one password they have access to all the accounts, but maybe the hacker shouldn’t have access to the one password to begin with. Still, there are options; password managers, some just as easy as a USB device, or even a notebook can be a help here.

In the end, the Brits are realizing exactly what they should. Mobile payments are a wonderful tool, that makes shopping vastly more convenient. Relying on mobile payments without a backup, though, isn’t a good idea. Any network-based application does quite well until there’s no network for whatever reason, so having a backup is just good common sense.