The so-called Millennials, born between the 1980’s and 2000, are, today, at the center of numerous studies aimed at understanding their political views, their working habits and their consumption trends, because they will inevitably signal the trends for the coming years. And from the world of money another loud and clear signal has appeared: heading the use of the most innovative payment methods is the Y generation.
It is particularly evident in the U.S., where the use of credit and debit cards is more widespread among the very young who often also access mobile banking services to check their transactions and balance. It is an apparently counter-intuitive fact that the spending capacity of this segment is, on average, lower than the others (even if when analyzed well the data also shows that 92% have an active bank account), but can be perfectly explained by their propensity to use new technologies and to own smartphones.
Percentage of Millenials who have active bank accounts
Percentage of smartphone owners per generation
The Boomers are more skeptical about the possibilities of putting their own payment data on their smartphones. When they are asked to express an opinion on who the most trustworthy supplier of online and mobile payment services, 43% still respond that it is their bank, 13% the payment circuit, 9% OTT suppliers, and just 6% telephone providers.
To the contrary, the order of the day for Millenials seems to be multichannel marketing. According to a Western Union Bill Payments Money Mindset Index report (here is an interesting infographica), one out of three use more than 3 channels to pay their bills. 38% of Y Geners already use mobile banking apps versus an average 22% for the other generations, 43% visualize their past account transactions versus an average of 25%. Among the traditional electronic payment systems (card payments) the Millenials prefer debit cards (used 41% of the time versus 28% for other types).
Among the more innovative options, the preferred type seems to be P2P (possibly because it is immediate and cheaper), which was preferred 67% of the cases and far surpasses PayPal in the classification. While 21% of them have never signed a paper check in their lives.
In light of this data, it is reasonable to think that it will be precisely the Y Geners who will realize the forecasts made by Gartner that estimate a growth of transit of up to 721 billion dollars for online and mobile by 2017.
