comScore study reveals opportunities, barriers in digital wallet market
08 February, 2013
category: NFC
A report released by comScore Inc. offers insight into consumer awareness, opinion and intent to use current digital wallet solutions.
The study — entitled Digital Wallet Road Map 2013 — found that outside of PayPal, digital wallets registered awareness among only 51% of U.S. consumers.
As the comScore report reveals, this lack of awareness coupled with a general misunderstanding of the benefits that mobile wallet solutions provide has provided a barrier to adoption.
The study is based on comScore’s research design, which combines an opt-in panel of 1 million U.S. consumers and two disparate surveys of more than 2,000 U.S. Internet users conducted in November of 2012. The study accounted for consumer intent by removing the awareness gap that exists between users and prospects by introducing participants to various digital wallet solutions first-hand.
PayPal remains king in a fragmented digital wallet landscape, split among providers due to low consumer adoption— with 12% of consumers admitting having used a digital wallet other than PayPal. As the comScore study posits, however, the key to increasing mobile wallet adoption will likely be education.
After being asked to review the websites of specific digital wallets, study participants still scored an average of just 45% in level of understanding across all wallet brands.
The study also shows that security remains a chief concern, but that an overwhelming number of consumers remain unaware of the security features intrinsic to digital wallet solutions. The study reports that 93% of consumers would prefer to use a digital wallet that has to be unlocked before use, while just 57% realized— after reviewing the digital wallet website— that a locking feature was already available.
The study posits that by increasing the amount of security information in a clear and concise manner could be a valuable step in increasing the rate of mobile wallet adoption.
See the full comScore report here.
