Aimia has released a new research into consumer appetite for digital wallets in Europe. Its findings show that the interest has grown by 5% from last year to 31% of Europeans being likely to use a digital wallet on their mobile device now.
What is Aimia Inc?
Aimia Inc provide their clients with customer insights in relation to helping them make smarter business decisions and build relevant, rewarding and long term one-to-one relationships through partnerships with groups of companies and generating, collecting and analyzing customer data to build actionable insights.
They do this through their own coalition loyalty programs with clients such as Aeroplan in Canada, Nectar in the UK, Air Miles in the Middle East and through the provision of loyalty strategy, program development, implementation and management services underpinned by leading products and technology platforms.
Their clients are diverse and they have industry leading expertise in the fast moving retail, financial services, consumer goods, travel and airline industries globally.
Research findings
Aimia’s research revealed that Italy had the highest percentage of people likely to use a digital wallet at 47%, up 11% on the previous year.
Spain came in 2nd with 39% up from 30% the year before, the UK was 3rd at 26% an increase of just 3% with France decreasing 1% to 22% and Germany stable at 19%.
In regards to what consumers are most likely to store in their digital wallets their research found 65% chose coupons and vouchers, 63% said loyalty cards and to make cashless payments it was 56%.
Data security
The biggest deterrent towards the use of digital wallets by consumers in Europe was found to be reservations around data security with 38% of respondents stating this as a primary reason.
Marc Allsop, Senior Vice President and Head of Global Business Development at Aimia, says:
“Over the past year we have seen the digital wallets market grow from strength to strength. It is clear digital payments will play an important role in the way consumers go about their daily shopping habits, impacting the future retail landscape across Europe. However, we still have work to do before digital wallets will become a universal method of payment.”
Allsop explains that some customers still question the reliability and security of the technology and payment providers need to work hard to improve customer confidence. Only then digital payments will truly become part of everyday shopping behaviour.
Everyone’s personal swiss bank account
These statistics don’t take into account cryptocurrency based digital wallets such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Dash or Ethereum which are growing year on year by the millions, with Blockchain.info alone catering to 6.75 million users.
Although it most definitely gives us an insight into the mainstream and the fringes and when they correlate together through time, digital wallets of the decentralised cryptographic nature will easily become everyone's personal swiss bank account in their pocket.