Mobile phones gain popularity for credit card transactions

comScore is one of the biggest Internet research agencies in the world – it tracks on-line information for some of the Internet’s largest companies. Today, it has released results from its tracking of US credit card use on-line over the past year. And it shows a very healthy increase in the number of people who trust their mobile devices enough to complete credit card transactions on them.

What’s the story?

The mobile factor is only one part of the larger study – based on findings from the panel of 1 million people that comScore maintains in the US, as well as a survey of 2,000 internet users from December 2010. The full report can be seen here, but we’re focusing only on the mobile aspect.

What are the findings?

There’s an interesting feedback loop at work here. As issuers of credit cards provided services like on-line banking, their customers became more interested in them. The more interest the users showed, the more services were provided. Many issuers are now very keen on providing their customers the easiest possible methods to use their cards by web or by phone. And users are beginning to respond:

• 76% of cardholders accessed their accounts online during 2010, up 5% from 2009.
• 16% of mobile owners used their mobile browser to manage their accounts or complete a transaction
• 13% used a mobile app to manage their accounts or complete a transaction
• 13% used SMS to manage their accounts or complete a transaction

What we think?

Those are raw usage numbers. For most of those users, mobile is not the primary method they use for credit transactions. Mobile browsing gets the most primary users, and that’s at 4%. Still, that’s a very good result for a channel that’s still in its youth. The feedback loop mentioned above will continue to do its work – the more people that use mobile services, the more will be provided, more trust will grow, and usage figures will eventually surge. I imagine there will be an exponential curve to this graph in 2011.