There are some fascinating statistics in an article on Mobile banking on the website Bank Info Security. Under the heading “Mobile Banking Grows Slowly” it shows how different mobile usage in the US is to the rest of the world and in doing so may answer some of the suppositions.

America is possibly the worst place in the world for M-Pesa style mobile banking. It’s a place, perhaps the only major place, where banking trails mobile usage. One of the stats reported is

“Of those U.S. adults who were
surveyed, Javelin found that only 74
percent currently own mobile devices.
That percentage reflects a marked
decrease from 2008 and 2009, when in
both years the percentage of mobile
ownership was 85. Globally, about
two-thirds of the world’s population
is estimated to use mobile devices.”

What that hides in the wrapper of thinking that the rest of the world is like us, is that two-thirds of the world is a huge number of very poor people. People too poor to be able to regularly eat meat, yet they have a mobile phone.

The article, citing a Javelin report blames mobile adoption and the recession on the slow up-take of mobile banking.
I’d argue that habits are a more significant barrier, the late switch from analog (sic) to digital means Americans are suspicious of security, but everyone is cautious about adopting new technologies. Bluetooth took two years from being a technology demonstration to appearing in the Ericsson R320 and another five before it became mainstream. Text messaging similarly took five years from first launch to mainstream acceptance.
And that’s mobile where people are predisposed to upgrades and change. We are all a lot more cautious about money. Credit cards took over a decade to get serious adoption and even then they were something you only used for big purchases and emergencies. It’s taken something like 30 years to go from the first mainstream credit cards to people using them to buy a newspaper.