Tim Cook has previously expressed his surprise at how slow mobile payments are growing in the U.S.
It seems that he’s not wrong, either. A new report shows that the United States is lagging behind other parts of the world when it comes to adopting mobile payments. Although Apple Pay is actually doing pretty well compared to its rivals.
“The reality is we’re not there yet,” Will Graylin, a former Samsung Pay executive, told CNBC. “There is simply not enough ubiquitous acceptance.”
In China, more than 80% of consumers use mobile payments. However, in the U.S. that number is still below 10%. That’s despite the fact that 81% of Americans now use a smartphone. One reason posited is that other countries, such as China and India, were previously cash-based.
Unlike the U.S., which has embraced credit cards, places like China and India were quick to embrace mobile payments because the alternative was carrying around large quantities of money.
Photo: CNBC
“There is incredible saturation among debit cards and credit cards in the U.S. and Europe,” said Arieh Levi, senior analyst at CB Insights. “So people already had a way to pay digitally that isn’t cash. In areas where mobile is common, there weren’t really established legacy players already.”
Apple Pay is 9% of U.S. payments
Figures accompanying the CNBC report shows that Apple Pay currently makes up around 9% of U.S. payments. Considering that it only launched a few years ago, that actually sounds pretty impressive to me.
eMarketer claims that Apple Pay has 22 million users in the United States right now. That’s double the 11.1 million using Google Pay. However, it lags slightly behind the Starbucks app, which is most widely used payments app in the U.S. — with 23.4 million users.
Which mobile payments app, if any, do you use? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: CNBC
