Dive Brief:

• Consumers are seeking to carry fewer digital wallets on their devices, according to a report published earlier this month by global consulting firm McKinsey. The report presented findings from an August survey of about 1,800 U.S. consumers.
• In responses, 31% of consumers said they expected to rely on a single digital wallet such as those created by tech giants Apple, Google and Samsung. That’s up from 21% in 2021. And the share of consumers expecting to maintain three or more digital wallets dropped to 20% from 30% over the same period. 
• That change in expectation is due to digital wallets being more widely accepted by retail merchants, McKinsey Senior Partner Marie-Claude Nadeau, one of the authors of the report, said in a Friday interview. “The breadth of acceptance now has tipped to a point where people will expect the [digital] wallet to be accepted everywhere,” Nadeau said. 

Dive Insight:

The security of the wallet and trust in its provider were essential for consumers when choosing a digital wallet, the report said. Nearly 70% of survey respondents listed those benefits as among their top criteria.

McKinsey’s report noted that consumer trust in big banks, smaller banks and big tech firms alike slid this year compared to last year, but not in equal measure across the categories. The percentage decline for big tech companies was the smallest.

Trust remained highest for big banks, with 50% of respondents trusting them highly, but big tech companies are narrowing that gap, with 41% of consumers expressing high trust in big tech companies.

The report noted that big tech companies are now considered more trustworthy than regional and community banks when it comes to digital payments, with 35% of respondents declaring a high degree of trust in regional/consumer banks.

Nadeau attributed this change to this year’s banking crisis, precipitated by the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, noting “bank failures don't contribute to trust in the banking industry.”

Nadeau clarified that trust in big tech companies such as Apple, Google, Meta and Amazon is not the same for each company. She said that consumers trusted tech companies that had invested in security features and in public communication focused on building trust. But Nadeau declined to comment on which companies in particular had built that trust.