According to a new PayPal report called ‘Money: The Digital Tipping Point’, 2016 will be the year when UK shoppers start using their mobile phones in earnest to pay for things on the high street with digital money rather than cash, cheques or cards. UK mobile retail sales in five years’ time are expected to reach £2.5 billion with over 14 million adults regularly shopping via their mobiles.
Over a million PayPal UK customers have already used their mobile phones to send a personal or business payment.
Carl Scheible, Managing Director of PayPal UK, said “We’ll see a huge change over the next few years in the way we shop and pay for things. By 2016, you’ll be able to leave your wallet at home and use your mobile as the 21st century digital wallet. Our vision of money is to enable you to pay for something from wherever you are, whatever device you’re on – a PC, mobile phone, tablet, games console and a whole lot more. 2016 will mark the real start of money’s digital switchover in the UK. We’re not saying cash will disappear entirely, but we’ll increasingly use our phones and other devices rather than our wallets to pay in-store as well as online.”
In June this year, PizzaExpress launched a mobile application created by 2ergo that allowed UK diners to pay their bill via PayPal on an iPhone.