Canadians paying with cards, not cash: study

Canadian consumers are more inclined to reach for their smartphones and credit cards over bills and coins to make purchases, according to a new study.

Market and consumer information firm GfK conducted an online survey of 1,000 Canadians as part of a larger study on shopping behaviours.

In 2015, only 25 per cent of Canadian transactions were in cash, a decline of two percentage points from 2014. Meanwhile, credit cards accounted for the majority of transactions at 42 per cent, unchanged from the previous year.

“We also saw a number of years ago in this country a very concerted effort by the card companies to get people to start using their cards for smaller payments. That clearly has worked,” said Stephen Popeil, vicepresident of GfK Canada.

“We’re clearly seeing that the use of cash is getting less and less in this country. Is it ever going to disappear? I don’t think so, because of the nature of certain economies that are out there. But clearly, what we are seeing now is every year fewer and fewer payments are being made with cash.”

Debit cards were at 28 per cent, with mobile device payments at three per cent. Each category saw marginal growth of a percentage point compared to 2014.

With mobile payments, GfK found they tend to skew to younger and higher-income Canadians, as well as among urban dwellers and those with a higher education. But the high-tech payment method is also catching on with boomers and those born between 1925 and 1945.

Despite the convenience of mobile payments, the research revealed concerns over security. The survey found 53 per of Canadians agreed they were worried about their personal information when using a mobile payment app, and only 22 per cent agreed they were confident their mobile device payments were 100 per cent secure.

The polling industry’s professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error as they are not a random sample and therefore are not necessarily representative of the whole population.