Perhaps MasterCard Worldwide may have acted too swiftly in dropping its MoneySend funds-transfer service. Consumers queried recently listed MoneySend among the top five mobile-payment services they had used.
In an online survey involving 2,663 U.S. residents IDC Financial Insights conducted in May, 20.1% of respondents said they had used MoneySpend. Ahead of the MasterCard product were PayPal Mobile at 56%, Amazon Payments at 41.2%, Apple Inc.’s iTunes/App Store at 39.8% and Google Wallet at 21.3%.
Numerous other choices were given, but none, including transactions through Square Inc.’s mobile card reader (cited by 6.1% of respondents), registered above 20%.
“This makes MasterCard’s recent decision to close the MoneySpend service in the United States a bit of a mystery; perhaps it is being replaced by the
Despite the surprise, Aaron McPherson, IDC practice director, believes the survey results correctly portray the market. “The percentages probably are a bit high, but the order probably is correct,” he said in an interview.
To test the reliability of the results, IDC listed mobile-payment choices not offered under their own brand names or that are not offered in the U.S., and “in a surprisingly large number of cases found respondents claiming to have used them,” the report notes.
“This indicates that consumers are not yet paying much attention to mobile payments or do not clearly understand which services they are using,” IDC noted.
Interestingly, the results suggest that mobile payments at the point of sale are not much less common than are those initiated for digital goods or online services, the opposite of what IDC hypothesized going into the study.
“This is good news for companies that are focused on working with brick-and-mortar merchants, such as LevelUp, PayPal and Square,” the report notes.
On its website, MasterCard says it originally launched MoneySend as a U.S. test of person-to-person payments. The card brand plans to close the MoneySend website on Sept. 1, but the MoneySend platform will continue to support financial institutions and their person-to-person payment offerings across the globe as a B2B service.
Effective June 1, registered users no longer may send or load funds using their MoneySend account, but they may continue to use the website to transfer funds from their MoneySend account to valid bank accounts until Sept 1. Account balances after Sept. 1 will be returned to users via mail in the form of a check.
