India, Indonesia lead growth in mobile payments

Asia-Pacific now leads the way in the adoption of mobile payments, according to a report by ACI Worldwide (ACI) entitled “Global Consumer Survey and Consumer Trust and Security Perceptions.”

Within the Asia, India and Indonesia saw the biggest growth of mobile wallet use with 56% of Indian and 47% Indonesian participants of saying that they used mobile wallets. This represents a significant increase from 2014 results which saw 47% of Indian and 32% of Indonesian survey participants using mobile wallets.

The rapid growth in the use of mobile payments in these respective countries have led to the emergence of a number of telecom-backed mobile wallet players such as Indonesia’s TCASH and India’s Airtel Money. TCASH recently announced plans to expand its payment platform to the country’s Semarang Rapid Transit Bus service.

“Mobile wallets really started to grow in popularity after the launch of Apple Pay almost three years ago,” says Mark Ranta, head of digital banking solutions, ACI Worldwide. “What we are seeing is a tipping point regarding adoption, which can be attributed to the fact that consumers worldwide are now almost exclusively using payment-enabled devices, as older models have cycled out, with a few exceptions.”

Growth in mobile payments in Asia-Pacific is a sign that consumers are getting more comfortable with financial information being stored in a mobile device.

The ACI Worldwide discovered that 94% of Indian, 87% of Indonesian and 79% of Singaporean participants feel that the information on their mobile devices was somewhat or completely secure.    

But despite the increasing acceptance of mobile payments, several merchants have actually stopped accepting mobile payments.

A 2017 report by Kount states that only 22% of its surveyed participants were supporting mobile payments compared to 34% in 2016. The report states that issues such as expensive hardware, rising mobile fraud and high processing fees were to blame for the drop in usage. Data from Kount reveals that 40% of interviewed merchants had seen an increase in mobile channel fraud.