Mobile payments rise among boomers

Survey finds 49 percent of boomers not currently making payments using mobile technology plan to do so.

A new report on how mobile banking is used in person-to-person transactions suggests that using a cellphone or tablet to make payments is a growing trend among baby boomers.

A survey commissioned by Bank of America found that 49 percent of baby boomer respondents who aren’t currently making person-to-person payments using mobile technology offerings plan to do so before the end of 2017. Baby boomers only accounted for 20 percent of the survey respondents currently making mobile person-to-person payments.

Bill Tommins, market executive-commercial banking, Southern New England at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said mobile and online transactions are one of the hottest business segments the company has.

“We’re seeing real growth, month over month and year over year,” Tommins said, “And this is not something we’re pushing people into.”

Sixty-eight percent of survey respondents said they made use of mobile person-to-person payments was in order to save time.

The survey also indicates that the size of a payment is not an obstacle to whether a mobile person-to-person transaction is made. Nearly half of survey respondent said they would be comfortable sending making a payment of $1,000 or more.

The results of the survey were released in advanced of the launch of Zelle, a digital payment network used to make person-to-person payments by using the mobile applications from Bank of America and about 30 other major banks. The big banks have teamed up create and market the new network, which is designed to compete with Venmo, a digital payment service owned by PayPal.

The fact that baby boomers and other segments of the population are growing increasingly comfortable with many different forms of mobile banking is hardly surprising, said John Carusone, president of the Bank Analysis Center, a Hartford-based industry consulting firm. Banks are following the lead of retailers when it comes taking many aspects of their business online, Carusone said.

“The challenge for a bank wishing to have a sustainable strategy is finding the right investment mix between electronic clicks, bricks and mortar branches and face-to-face exchanges with staff and customer,” he said.