I am clearly not an expert about millennials. I don’t know what it must be like to have grown up in a world where e-Mails and Social media were not something that you “discovered” when you were thirty – it were things that were always there. I don’t know what it is like to have digital photographs documenting all of your life. Yet, what I do know is that these people will occupy the planet when I am gone… and they will use the systems to pay that we are conceiving now.

It is kind-of important to figure out what they do and how they interact with payment systems today. That is why I enjoyed looking at the results of a recent study performed by Vocalink (Read it here).

The first thing that shocked me was that 87% of the sample surveyed deposited a check in the last three months, but then I noticed that the study was based on US millennials only, and it is true that no human being can actually operate without checks in the US… currently.

But then, when I got over the shock, I found the following statistics quite interesting:

• Millenials use cards to pay for food and drink (and not cash)
• They sell stuff online
• They are comfortable using their mobile phone to make payments and
• they often send payments to other countries or make some kind of cross-currency payment.

It is important that we do not use our frame of reference when we think about what payment systems should look like when we envisage the future. What was good then, is not what would be good for the future. The payment systems of the future will have to run on devices, cater for an on-line lifestyle and provide for real-time payment experiences (even if a Dollar payment gets converted in to Euros).