
Australia's Inadequacy In Adoption Of Mobile Payment Platforms
CIO Review APAC | Monday, April 25, 2022

When it comes to using mobile payment platforms, Australian consumers lag behind their Asian counterparts, and only 25.1 percent of Australian Internet users use mobile payment services monthly despite their innovative services
FREMONT CA: Australian consumers are far behind their Asian counterparts in adopting mobile payment platforms (MPP), which condemns banks for keeping individuals benefiting from MPPs' recent phenomenal regional growth. Although Australians are among the world's most avid smartphone users, a Griffith Asia Institute study found that users from the APAC region are the least advanced adopters of alternative payment platforms such as Alipay, WeChat Pay, and UnionPay.
According to the researchers, MPPs' business model shifts the center of payment transactions from the banking system to commerce, transforming the payment industry through disintermediation of banking and realignment of incentives between consumers, merchants, and payment service providers.
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In defiance of their innovative design, only 25.1 percent of Australian Internet customers use mobile payment services monthly in comparison with Hong Kong (46.7 percent), Thailand (45.3 percent), Taiwan (42.6 percent), and Singapore (37.5 percent).
Despite the tech behemoths, Southeast Asian markets are more advanced in adopting technology, while the Australia-New Zealand markets bear more influence from banks. In China, mobile payments have been the most popular way of paying for goods and services since 2017, with cash coming in second and debit and credit cards coming in a distant third.
In Australia, banks' supremacy over national payments infrastructure has thwarted MPP platform adoption, with increased usage of Apple Pay and Google Pay in March 2020, as contactless payment mandates forced recalcitrant banks to embrace the technology after years of obstruction. These hindrances had prevented Australia's payments sector from profiting from a unique, practically non-replicable market situation for mobile payment to grow.
Australians are rapidly adopting this technology and catching up with the rest of the world. However, while conducting the majority of retail transactions, Australians still choose card-based contactless solutions related to their banks. On an average Australia made around 625 electronic transactions per person in 2020-21, up from 275 a decade earlier, and aims to become completely cashless within years.
Last year, debit cards accounted for over 75 percent of all payments in Australia, up from around 60 percent a decade ago. In RBA’s opinion, the conventional credit cards dominated online shopping as the rapid pandemic-driven moved to online commerce, which multiplied the share of purchases conducted online two-fold.
The APAC region has ostensibly been the most charismatic in line with economic growth and technological innovation with highly diversified business patterns, a large presence of SMEs, and mainly cash culture because of less developed financial services suggesting greater potential and the prospect of a digital and cashless society.
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