It’s becoming more and more important to really understand how consumers are paying for things, especially in the retail sector, so that businesses can ensure they remain up to date with how their customers wish to pay.

For that reason, we recently commissioned a survey looking into consumer payments trends to give us some indication of what might be the ‘hot ways to pay’ in 2016.

Some recent articles might have predicted the ‘death of cash payments’ but our research has shown this isn’t the case just yet. 32 percent of those we surveyed who are millennials, aged 18-24, said that cash is their preferred method of payment. Shockingly, Point of Sale (POS) digital payment methods, such as Apple Pay or PayPal, only received 0.65 per cent of the vote from everyone who answered.

When asked what their main method of payment is, debit cards came out on top with 46.40 per cent of those surveyed selecting debit as their main method of transaction.
The survey also showed that these payment decisions were being made for simplicity rather than safety, with a whopping 80.89 per cent of those surveyed agreeing that they use their preferred method of payment because it’s easy to do so.

Out of everyone surveyed, just 33.30 per cent of people said they have a payment or banking app on their tablet or mobile phone, showing that physical methods of payment are still going strong, despite these predictions of the death of cash.

So despite all of the worrying cash death articles published recently, our survey has shown that all of the age groups surveyed agree that Britain will still be using cash in 2030. Looking at the results from this survey, I think it’s safe to say that we can hang on to our bank notes a little while longer.