Americans are not using their smartphones to pay for stuff as much as other nations, according to Bain, the management consultancy.
While 80% of people in China are using mobile payments, less than one in ten US customers do the same.
Speaking with CNBC, Gerard du Toit, partner and head of the banking and payments sector of Bain’s financial services practice in North America, said, “The US is not a leader when it comes to mobile payments – at best, it’s the middle of the pack compared to other countries.”
He explained that the reason why places like China and India are seeing a pivot towards mobile payments is because these nations are “very cash-based economies”, which made the introduction of the new payment method a “dramatic improvement versus having to manage a whole bunch of cash.”
In India, as FinTech Global has reported earlier, the adoption could be partly attributed to the government’s push to embrace digital payments.
In China, this trend has been led by tech titans like Tencent and Alibaba, according to the CNBC report.
In the US, there seemingly was not the same need to rapidly adopt the technology as credit and debit cards had been established for decades. “A big driver of mobile adoption is just how big an improvement is it,” du Toit told CNBC. “When it comes to the U.S., there is a good enough solution there already.”
Copyright © 2019 FinTech Global
