Australians Increasingly Eschew Cash and Card for Mobile Payments

Mobile payments are catching on just about everywhere, and Australia is serving as an excellent case-in-point example. While cash is still king in large portions of the world, a new report from Commonwealth Bank suggests that Australia’s interest in cash—and even in card payments—is on the decline in favor of mobile payments tools.

Australians are increasingly turning to mobile payments tools—particularly tools like Android Pay, Apple Pay and Samsung Pay—to pay for things, and the Commonwealth Bank study suggests that that number is up significantly over just last year, up 35 percent to 16.8 million users for the first six months of 2018.

Commonwealth Bank is taking this development seriously; it reportedly opened up new options to allow customers to tie in their Visa cards to a mobile payments account, where previously only a CBA Mastercard could be used. Indeed, some reports note that customers that don’t have access to mobile payments are beginning to voice annoyance at banks not keeping up with the trend, and some may well jump ship as a result of this lack. So far, only ANZ in the Big Four banks is offering access to Apple Pay, and sluggish adoption rates seem to be frustrating customers.

Michael Baumann, Commonwealth Bank’s acting executive general manager of everyday banking, noted “The tap and pay functionality is used particularly at major supermarkets and is one in every five tap and pay transactions that we are conducting. Another 10 percent take place at major fast food chains and another 10 percent at petrol stations.”

Mobile payments’ convenience is a substantial part of the draw for a lot of users, and for the growing numbers of Australians either putting it to work right now or demanding it be made available, that seems to be no different here. In fact, what’s great about this news is that the old familiar specter of mobile payments security doesn’t seem to be rearing its head at all. People want access to the service; they’re not raising concerns about safety, but instead are actively pursuing it.

That’s great news for the sector in general, and before too much longer, we’ll likely see a big new crop of Australian mobile payment users getting in on the action.