A recent online survey revealed that consumers in the United States feel that cryptocurrency is safer.
According to a recent survey of 1,400 online American customers, people are more comfortable with digital currencies such as Bitcoin than they are with mobile wallets and other types of payment app.
The results of the poll were reported in the 2015 Future of Retail study by Walker Sands.
The respondents to the survey were asked to rate the method of payments that they feel are the most secure. The majority of people who participated in the study selected cash as the method that they felt was the most secure (56 percent). The second most secure method was seen as credit cards (22 percent). In third place was cryptocurrencies (3 percent), checks (2 percent), and then finally mobile wallets (1 percent).
That said, even though mobile wallets didn’t do very well, they still showed an increase in the confidence in the apps.
Clearly, mobile payments are starting to catch on within the opinion of consumers. Among the respondents in the survey, 40 percent said that they had actually used one of those mobile apps within the past year. This was a considerable increase over the figure from 2013, which had been only 8 percent. Among those who had used one of those applications, 45 percent had used Google Wallet, specifically. Forty one percent used a banking payment app. One in every three had used an app that was specific to a retailer.
Though only 4 percent of the respondents in the survey had tried Apple Pay, it is important to note that while many of the mobile payments apps have been in existence for the full previous year, Apple Pay only launched near the end of last year. That said, among all of those surveyed, 18 percent said that the introduction of that specific smartphone based transaction method made them feel more likely to use this type of transaction in the future.
Among iPhone users, specifically, 36 percent said that they were more willing to use a mobile wallet since the launch of Apple Pay.
