Mobile phones have increasingly become tools that consumers use for banking, payments, budgeting, and shopping. Given the rapid pace of developments in the area of mobile finance, the Federal Reserve Board began conducting annual surveys of consumers’ use of mobile financial services in 2011. This 78-page report, “Consumers and Mobile Financial Services” (March, 2015) examines trends in the adoption and use of mobile banking, payments, and shopping behavior and how the emergence of mobile financial services affects consumers’ interaction with financial institutions.
Android Pay Coming… to Eat Apple’s Lunch?
Google may be unveiling a new mobile payments platform called Android Pay at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco. It should be well integrated with Google’s Android mobile operating system, and could very well beat Apple Pay in its features and functionality.
Google’s previous forray into mobile payments, Google Wallet, never really got off the ground as phone carriers worked to prevent it working with their phones, and because merchants were slow to sign up. However, with its purchase of Softcard, says Venture Beat, ” Google bought a way to get Android Pay onto phones, because the phone companies no longer had an incentive to block it. They were out of the mobile payments business.”
Read more, via Venture Beat