Millennials Flock to Digital Wallets but Boomers Are More Cautious

As consumers across age groups adopt mobile wallets, some generations are engaging with the technology in many different aspects of their lives, while others are proving to be a little more hesitant.

For the PYMNTS study “The Mobile Wallet Challenge: Replacing Physical With Digital,” created in collaboration with ACI Worldwide, we surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. consumers about their comfort level and interest in using mobile wallets to manage their finances and store sensitive personal information. The results revealed that while mobile wallet features are being used by consumers of all ages, they are especially popular among millennials and bridge millennials.

Across generations, the findings revealed that the average consumer uses 5.5 mobile wallet features. Yet baby boomers and seniors were dramatically less likely to adopt these features, using less than half as many as the cross-generation average. Specifically, the average consumer in this age group uses just 2.5 mobile wallet features.

In contrast, the group using the greatest number of mobile wallet features — millennials — uses more than three times that amount. That is the average millennial uses 8.1 mobile wallet features.

In terms of mobile wallet feature use, this generation was followed by bridge millennials — those who were born between 1980 and 1989. These cuspers use 7.9 features on average.

Given the wide gap between millennials’ mobile wallet feature adoption and that of baby boomers and seniors, it may seem that the younger a consumer is, the more mobile wallet features they use. But PYMNTS research revealed that this is not the case. Rather, Generation Z consumers use significantly fewer mobile wallet features than millennials or bridge millennials, using 6.7 on average.

Every generation except baby boomers and seniors leverages an above-average number of mobile wallet features. Even Generation X over-indexes relative to the population-wide mean, with the average consumer in this generation currently using 5.8 mobile wallet features — a sizeable number, considering how relatively recent the technology is.