More Mobile Phone Users Report Having Made Mobile Payments

Some 22% of mobile phone users surveyed in 2014 by the Federal Reserve report having made a mobile payment at some point during the prior 12 months, up from 17% the prior year, according to the agency’s 4th annual study of mobile financial services.

Among mobile phone users, the 18-29 (34%) and 30-44 (31%) age groups proved most likely to have used mobile payments, as did Black non-Hispanics (34%) and Hispanics (32%).

The most common mobile payment tasks among smartphone users who identified as payment users were:

  • Paying bills online through a mobile web browser or app (19%);
  • Making an online or in-app purchase (16%); and
  • Paying for a product or service at a store (11%).

For those not using mobile payments, the most oft-cited reasons were a greater ease in paying with cash or credit cards (75%), not seeing any benefits to using mobile payments (59%) and concern about the security of those payments (59%).

Meanwhile, the use of mobile banking also grew on a year-over-year basis, although it surprisingly stalled among the youngest age group.  Overall, 39% of respondents with a mobile phone and a bank account reported using mobile banking during the 12 months prior to the survey, up from 33% in the 2013 survey.

While the percentage of 30-44-year-olds using mobile banking grew quickly (from 43% to 54%), the share of respondents aged 20-29 using them actually declined slightly, from 63% to 60%.

Hispanics (53%) continues to show above-average rates of mobile banking adoption, as did black non-Hispanics (43%).

Among mobile banking users, the following activities were the most commonly performed during the prior 12 months:

  • Checking an account balance or recent transactions (94%);
  • Downloading the bank’s mobile banking app on their mobile phone (71%);
  • Transferring money between bank accounts; and
  • Receiving an alert from the bank (57%).

As with mobile payments, those not using mobile banking most commonly cited a lack of reason to do so and concerns over its security.

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