New research from Roy Morgan has found that men prefer to use traditional online services, while women are twice as likely to take advantage of ‘buy now, pay later’ services.
Men
Men strongly represent online shopping, with their preferred methods including PayPal, Visa Checkout and Masterpay.
Men are commonly using other contactless/cardless mobile payment services, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay or Samsung Pay, with 9.6 per cent of men having indicated that they use these services.
In addition, more men (5.5 per cent) than women (4.1 per cent) have used their banks’ own mobile payment services, such as Commbank Tap and Pay, ANZ Pay, NAB Pay and BankWest Halo.
Women
The rise in ‘buy now, pay later’ services, including Afterpay and Zip Pay, has been taken up by twice as many women as men, according to Roy Morgan’s data.
The results have shown that the uptake of newer payment methods is more popular with women, with 11.6 per cent of women reporting that they had used ‘buy now, pay later’ services in the last 12 months, compared with just 5.5 per cent of men indicating the same.
Citing research from the University of Sydney, Roy Morgan CEO Michele Levine noted that many of these services are targeted towards females.
She considered that “afterpay services are often designed with women in mind”.
“Women tend to be very good debtors – so they pay on time – compared to men, and often very good in terms of the disciplines of payment schedules,” Ms Levine explained.
In addition to greater use of ‘buy now, pay later’ services, women were also found to be more likely to use traditional bill payment services, such as BPAY, with nearly three-fifths of women reporting to have used the service in the last 12 months.
Wearables a far less common way to pay
While the trend towards smart watches has been notable, the devices are yet to be commonly used as a payment method.
Fewer than 1 per cent of either sex reported that they had used wearable payment devices such as Fitbit Play, Garmin Play or Paywear in the last year for the purpose of a monetary transaction.
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