Bank of America Study Finds Heightened Interest in P2P Among Older Generations, Sheds Light on Consumer Preference and Vision for Payments

It has been a busy week for the peer-to-peer payment market.

Earlier last week, Apple announced it was integrating digital cash P2P payments through Apple Pay into its popular instant messaging application. And on Friday, a coalition of over 30 of the country’s largest financial service providers launched Zelle, a network that will enable 86 million banked Americans to instantly transfer funds to one another regardless of their bank.

The major movements in the market come at a good time, data from a recent Bank of America study suggest. According to the Bank of America Trends in Consumer Mobility Report released in May 2017, 49 percent of Boomers, 48 percent of Gen Xers and 47 percent of Millennials who do not currently use P2P expect that they will begin using digital P2P by the end of 2017.

In other words, interest is up and adoption is likely to follow.

The study also found that for 68 percent of respondents, the time savings and convenience of digital P2P was the top motivation for adopting digital P2P. Forty-eight percent answered that their top motivation was peer adoption, where only 16 percent answered that their top motivation was a desire to avoid cash and check usage.

Although aversion to checks was relatively low as a motivator for P2P adoption, the data show that checks are the result of significant frustration in payment habits for consumers. “When asked about others’ most annoying payments habits, checks cause the most frustration” the study said. Fifty-one percent of respondents said that paying via check in store was the most frustrating habit of their peers; the next largest portion — 38 percent — found delays associated with check payments, like long periods before withdrawal, to be the most annoying.

Perhaps most interestingly, 71 percent of respondents think that children under the age of 10 will never learn how to write a check. Fourteen percent even responded that they anticipate children under the age of ten will not know what cash is.

The survey was comprised of an online panel of 1,005 randomly-selected American adults with a bank account and a smart phone. The margin of error is +/- 3.1 percent. An additional 407 panelists were surveyed that also use a peer-to-peer payments service. The margin of error for that sample is +/- 4.9 percent.