Mobile payments aren’t going to dominate the holiday shopping season this year.
In a new report, Bankrate.com says just 14% of US adults surveyed said they’d use a mobile wallet like Apple Pay, Android Pay, or Samsung Pay this holiday season.
The reason consumers aren’t flocking to mobile? Some aren’t sure it’s safe. Roughly 36% of respondents to a Bankrate.com survey of 1,000 US adults said they were worried about the security behind mobile wallets. Another 31% thought other payment methods were more convenient.
Apple’s mobile wallet debuted to fanfare in late 2014 and it was expected to be a giant leap forward for mobile payments. But the data underscore how far mobile payments still have to go if they aim to displace the dominant payment behaviors in the US. That said, the US retail payment system is in the midst of a large scale shakeup, with retailers, consumers and card companies making a wholesale change to EMV chip cards, which are more secure than their predecessor—magnetic stripe cards. They are also slower to use.
Analysts and industry representatives think that mobile wallets are much more convenient and secure than chip cards. But if Bankrate.com’s survey is any indication, it looks like consumers will take a little more convincing.