68 percent of respondents — 15,000 consumers across 15 major global markets — prefer to use a PC or laptop when shopping online. Only 1 in 5 use their mobile phone and a smaller proportion (14 percent) use a tablet.
The reluctance to use a mobile device stems from perceptions that services are not secure (49 percent of respondents) or that personal data might be misused (47 percent). These results will no doubt disappoint the telecoms industry, which is investing massively in developing mobile payment services in both mature and emerging markets.
Angel Dobardziev, principal analyst at Ovum, said that this shows that operator strategies that factor in rapid adoption of mobile commerce services need a reality check. Furthermore, the industry must design services that build on users’ comfort with e-commerce over the PC and extend it to the m-commerce domain.
50 percent of respondents have no interest in trying mobile payments in the next 12 months, and fewer than 2 in 10 respondents make m-commerce transactions on a regular basis (excluding checking bank balances, which 35 percent use regularly).
Regionally attitudes to mobile financial services remain highly variable across regions. For instance consumers in Asia-Pacific are the leading adopters of mobile money services, followed by EMEA and then the Americas. In terms of age, younger consumers in the 16–34 age band are almost twice as likely to be users of mobile money services as their more mature peers in the 35+ band.
Ovum suggests that telecom service providers will need to understand and effectively address the subtle differences that concerned consumers have with using mobile money and mobile commerce services.
