Mobile payments rapidly growing in popularity
The UK is continuing to embrace mobile and contactless payments, with the total spend using such services booming in the first half of 2017, new research has revealed.
The latest payment figures from Worldpay, the UK's largest credit and debit card payment processor. It found that the amount of money spent using mobile payments topped £370 million in the first six months of 2017.
This represents a 336 percent increase in spending compared to the same period of last year, showing how UK consumers have rapidly adapted to using their devices to pay for goods and services.
Mobile spending is expected to continue to rise in the future, as the technology is still in its infancy in the UK, following the launch of Android Pay in 2016, and Samsung Pay earlier this year.
Supermarkets and grocery stores proved to be the most poplar location to use mobile payments, accounting for 55 percent of total spend so far in 2017.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Londoners remained the most common mobile spenders, with 28 percent of the UK total, however this actually represents a fall from last year's figure (32 percent at the end of 2016), showing how the adoption of mobile payments has become more widespread across the UK.
Overall, Worldpay calculated that the UK total spend using contactless hit £9 billion in the first six months of the year, meaning 2017 is already well set to top the £10 billion spent throughout the whole of last year.
Contactless payments now account for 38 percent of all non-cash transactions in the UK.
James Frost, UK CMO, Worldpay, commented: "Mobile spending has shaken off the novelty tag, and is breaking its own spending records virtually every month. Granted there’s still some way to go before we start cutting up our cards and chucking away our wallets, but it’s easy to see why everyone from start-ups to tech giants is eager to have a stake in the technology."
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