British shoppers will spend over £1.2 billion a week using their mobile devices, such as smartphones and wearables, by 2020, according to projections released today by Visa Europe.
One in four of us believe we will be spending more than £50 a week on mobile by 2020, the survey found, fuelling a three-fold growth in mobile payments. Sixty percent admitting they expect to use their mobile devices for payments at least once a week by this time.
The average shopper expects to spend £27 on mobile each week by 2020, £10 more than is spent today and nearly a quarter of respondents (24 per cent) predict they will spend more than £50 a week using their mobile device by 2020.
The increasing publicity around m-commerce options, digital wallets and contactless payments, has led 43 per cent of shoppers to say they would be interested in using a mobile wallet service and nearly half (47 per cent) are interested in using their smartphone to make everyday contactless payments in a shop.
The report also found that while apps and music are still the items purchased most frequently via mobile devices today, a growing number of consumers are already buying higher value items, with electronics (23 per cent) and clothes (22 per cent) among their top-five most purchased m-commerce items.
When looking at the main concerns about mobile payments, a third of respondents admitted that they didn’t know enough about it. As with other new technologies, this has resulted in apprehension around issues such as privacy, fraud and security.
Overall, UK consumers spent over £19,000 every second using their cards last year as the number of purchases surged by more than a tenth, as total UK-issued debit, credit and charge card spending both domestically and overseas rose by 8.2 per cent in 2014 to reach a record £600.3bn.
