Business slow to fully adopt e-payments

A survey of over 600 Australian organisations has revealed a curiously low rate of electronic payment acceptance.

According to the survey, commissioned by the Australian arm of Indian technology giant HCL Technologies and conducted by Roy Morgan Research, just 45 per cent of Australian businesses currently accept electronic payments (excluding direct payments) using credit or debit cards, PayPal or digital wallets.

Just six per cent of business reported accepting electronic-only payments.

But 17 per cent of those organisations which do accept electronic payments still require a minimum spend - mainly to reduce fees.

The relatively low acceptance of electronic payments is somewhat surprising given 73 per cent of the population has a credit card and there are more than 800,000 electronic point of sale terminals already deployed in Australia (never mind the rising tide of hand held POS devices. This finding is broadly in line with APCA's 2014 annual review that found cash represented 59 per cent of all sales by volume in 2013, although that was forecast to drop to 43 per cent by 2018.

Jason Hulme, general manager of financial services at Roy Morgan, said that without better alignment between consumers, merchants and institutions, the payments landscape would not change rapidly.

He said that only 26 per cent of businesses reported that their customers wanted to pay by PayPal, 0.4 per cent were interested in using digital wallets, and 0.3 per cent wanted to use cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to make payments.