At last year’s event announcing Apple Pay, Apple boss Tim Cook said that the mobile payment service “will forever change the way we pay for things”. A new study suggests that the service is certainly moving in that direction, uptake having steadily grown through 2015.
This study was by Phoenix Marketing International, whose director of Card Performance Research, Greg Weed, said at the Las Vegas-set Money 20/20 convention this week that 14% of households with eligible credit cards are using Apple Pay.
This figure, which Phoenix reached by polling 15,000 consumers during the past year, is 3 points higher than the adoption rate of 11% reached in February and reported by AppleInsider. This means that the growth rate has slowed, but remains good for a relatively new service.
A particularly eye-opening finding of the Phoenix research is that, in September, 79% of Apple Pay users reported completely replacing credit and debit cards with the iPhone and Apple Watch – a sharp rise from the 51% who reported as such in July. Availability of Apple Pay is currently limited to the US and UK, but there has recently been evidence of future launches in other countries.
