While the Western European nations lag behind countries in Asia in terms of mobile wallet adoption, there is plenty of room for growth if mobile payments can offer enough to consumers to displace payment cards, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

GlobalData’s 2018 Consumer Payments Insight Survey found that mobile wallet adoption in Asian markets such as China (64.9 percent), India (60.5 percent), Hong Kong (45.5 percent) and Taiwan (37.0 percent) is much higher than Western markets, including the UK (11.5 percent), France (5.1 percent), Germany (10.4 percent) and Spain (10.5 percent).

Bhavika Shah, payments analyst at GlobalData, explained, “The gap in mobile wallet adoption between developing and developed markets is a result of consumers disliking the idea of paying with their mobile phone. Majority of the Western consumers simply dismiss the technology on principle. Only a small proportion of them are testing mobile wallets.”

The survey results also highlight that statistically almost 40 percent of non-users do not like the idea of paying with their mobile in the UK, France, Germany and Spain. This is because paying with cards is the mainstream option across many Western countries and consumers have been comfortable using this method for a long time.

However, only a limited number of Western respondents who tried mobile wallets found the experience inconvenient. In the four Western European nations the percentage of respondents who have tried mobile wallets and found the experience inconvenient ranges between 2.4 percent and 4.1 percent. In contrast, in China, India, Hong Kong and Taiwan this proportion ranges from 4.3 percent to 14.4 percent.

“This shows that the key difference between East and West is that most consumers in the West have not tried mobile payments; their negative attitudes are not based on experience but on reaction to the concept,” said Shah.

Providers need to convince potential users that their mobile wallets provide benefits above and beyond the ability to pay at the point of sale, which consumers can already do via contactless cards.

Shah concluded, “Given the identified barriers for mobile wallet adoption in Western countries, in order to achieve critical mass, providers should move the value proposition of mobile wallets beyond payments. This could be achieved by providing reward and loyalty schemes, which have worked well in India, where people buying fuel via mobile wallets receive a discount of 0.25 percent.”