Visa Europe Projects Mobile Payments’ Time Has Hit

By 2020, in one every four Brits anticipate that they will spend more than £50 a week via mobile payments. That’s how commonplace European consumers who participated in a Visa Europe study expect mobile payments to become.

The “Mobile Money” study — which was conducted by Visa Europe between April and May 2015 in Finland, France, Germany, Poland, Spain and the U.K.— revealed that smart devices will replace cash and card transactions as the U.K. mobile payments market is set to reach £1.2 billion a week by 2020. While the average shopper now spends £17 on mobile per week, that number is set to increase by £10 by 2020.

“While we’re excited to see consumers saying they expect to triple their weekly spend using mobile payments over the next five years, we at Visa think those numbers could be rather conservative and that the actual adoption rate will be much higher,” said Jeremy Nicholds, executive director of mobile at Visa Europe, in a June 4 press release.

What’s interesting to note is the value of the goods purchased via mobile. Visa observed that a growing number of consumers are buying higher value items such as electronics (23 percent) and clothes (22 percent) ranking among their Top 5 most purchased m-commerce items. Additionally, 43 percent of shoppers also said they would be interested in using a mobile wallet service and 47 percent are interested in using their smartphone to make everyday contactless payments in a shop.

“It’s no longer a question of ‘if’ consumers will embrace this new way to pay — it’s when — and for us the next 12 months are when mobile payments become mainstream,” predicted Nicholds.

Visa Europe is not alone in keeping a watchful eye on the mobile payments space in the U.K. In late 2014, U.K. mobile payment operator, Zapp, rolled out its predictions, based on a poll of British consumers. Zapp further proclaimed that 2015 would be the year mobile payments would take off in the U.K.

Zapp’s study found that about 71 percent of the poll’s participants said they would be more likely to start paying through their smartphones if setting up the service was faster and easier. Further, more than half of the study’s participants said they were open to purchasing food, electronics, tickets and gas through their smartphones.

“I’m confident 2015 will prove a tipping point,” Zapp CEO Peter Keenan said, “as simple, secure mobile payments like Zapp become a reality for millions of British consumers.”

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