Mobile payment options can be a way for smartphone owners to take care of shopping, bills and more. According to IDC, total worldwide consumer mobile payments will reach $3.814 trillion annually by 2020. Moreover, a recent Nielsen survey says that 29 per cent of Canadians are actively using their phones as a mobile payment system, with over half of these Canadians using a digital wallet on a day-to-day basis.
However, while adoption is projected to speed up in Canada by 2020, there is still a large number of Canadians who don’t use mobile payment options. According to a survey by Technology Strategies International (TSI), a Canadian technology market research firm, just over 48 percent of respondents do not have a mobile payment option installed on their phones.
To that end, PayPal Canada has released a list of five benefits to using mobile payment options:
Convenience: Doing away with physical debit and credit cards means reducing the number of items a person needs to carry. Some applications also allow for in-app purchasing, meaning that shopping can be done all within one place.
Convertible currency: Mobile services can make payments in other countries more easy thanks to reduced interchange and conversion fees.
Flexibility: A digital payment platform allows travellers to easily swap payment options if a credit limit be reached or cards become locked out. Mobile payments may also encourage purchasers to spend more evenly across different cards.
More safety in-person: Digital payments do away with the need for having physical money, so users don’t have to worry about lost or stolen cash. Additional levels of security are also available through the encryption of credentials and biometric authentication of payments through fingerprint scanning.
More security online: Using a credit card directly can increase the risk of identity fraud, as payment information is being shared to many different places. With digital platforms such as PayPal, however, credit card information is kept private and not shared with multiple sources.
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