United States

The United States, with its final score of 41.5, is the great exemplar of one of the key findings of the MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index: Scale matters. The rider to this conclusion, however, is just as important: While scale matters, it can't determine readiness. It's neither a necessary nor sufficient condition. US consumers remain, roughly speaking, more aware of mobile payments than they are able to execute them.

The advantages of the US market are many: Highly developed and cost–efficient telecommunications, a diverse financial services infrastructure, and a population very interested in and willing to respond to innovation: America is notoriously the home of technological innovation, and average household expenditure in the United States, to take a broad metric, is more than $33,000 per annum, nearly 15 percent ahead of Australia, its nearest rival in this metric. So why (with the vital exception of m-commerce) aren't US consumers using mobile payments more?

In terms of key behaviors (as opposed to willingness and familiarity), US consumers either run with the pack (POS), or lag behind (send money)—in the latter case, far behind much smaller and less vertically integrated countries. And while the exception, m-commerce, is a big one, it's important to note that both China and Saudi Arabia do about twice as well in that important consumer metric.

Willingness to make mobile payments increases with income but decreases with age.