Smartphone payment services have 80% adoption rates in China but only 10% in the US

"According to new statistics from management consultancy Bain, some 80% of Chinese consumers used some form of smartphone payments service last year, far higher than a U.S. adoption rate of 10%, reports CNBC.
Broken down by service, the Chinese market is dominated by local systems like WeChat Pay and AliPay, both of which enjoyed over 80% adoption rates in 2018. Cash, bank cards, credit cards and bank apps follow, with Apple Pay listed as the most-used foreign service with 17% adoption.
Gerard du Toit, partner and head of Bain's banking and payments sector, notes countries like China and India are ripe for penetration due to their reliance on cash.
"China and India have been very cash-based economies — that has a pretty high hassle and friction factor," du Toit said. "Mobile payment is a dramatic improvement versus having to manage a whole bunch of cash."
Whereas Alibaba and Tencent offered attractive alternatives to traditional payments in a bid for Chinese consumer favor, India pushed the use of mobile payments to dissuade unrecorded cash transactions and thus reap consumption taxes.
The story is different in the U.S., where Apple Pay has a 9% adoption rate. By comparison, PayPal is used by 44% of American consumers, while credit card and cash boast respective adoption rates of 80% and 79%.
There is little incentive for consumers to ditch credit cards, the top form of payment in America, for a mobile payment alternative, du Toit notes. In some cases, swiping or inserting a credit card into a point of sale terminal is easier than pulling out an iPhone, unlocking it and tapping it on an NFC reader."

Source:  Apple Insider, 29th August 2019