Here at Leapfrogg, we have a panel of over 1000 retail consumers that we engage with on a regular basis to help us understand customer needs and expectations from the brands and retailers they buy from.

Every month, we question them on a range of areas from buying behaviours and brand opinion, to emotional purchase triggers and their recent shopping experiences.

The Insight Edit is our weekly bite size edit of the insight we gain from our panel in our search to truly understand the mind of the premium customer.

Mobile payments

The movement towards mobile payments has been touted as the next big thing for some time now. There are now a range of services now widely available that allow the consumer to purchase items in-store directly from their mobile phone.

Apple Pay is one such example, and allows anyone with an iPhone 6, Apple Watch and later edition iPads to make payments on any touchless payment point from a number of different credit card accounts.

Although there are already millions of UK consumers who have registered with mobile payment technology, we wanted to find out just how many were using it, or intended to in the future. We therefore asked our Premium Panel how they were currently using mobile payments.

Only 6.72 % of respondents said made purchases using their mobiles, with a further 7.48% stating that although they had the technology set up on their phones, they had never used it.

This means a total of only 14.2% consumers have taken any action to move towards making purchases on their mobile phones.

A further 14.35% plan to get mobile payment set up in the near future.

We then asked our panel why they weren’t keen to utilise mobile payments. 46% of our panel stated that they did not trust the technology, highlighting the fact that they were worried about fraud and the security risk.  45% stated that they didn’t need to use their mobile as they had a card they could easily use.

A further 26% were worried that a mobile is too easy to steal and 12.24% felt it was just a gimmick.

These stats show that whilst mobile technology is making huge advancements, consumers’ opinion is currently still rather behind. This is not to say that opinion will change over time. Many people were had worries about fraud and stolen cards when contactless payment was introduced, but now are more than happy to ‘tap’ for their purchases.

We will be interested to see how consumers adopt these new technologies in the future.