While the most popular online payment methods are online banking and bank cards used online, with 80% and 79% of Russian Internet users, respectively, using these methods regularly, no less than 62% pay with e-wallets. Just 47% utilize SMS-payments.
These are some of the key findings of a recently published TNS survey, which was made in 2015 among Internet users between 18 and 55 years of age who live in cities of 700,000 inhabitants or more across Russia.
More specifically, Yandex.Money, a leading Russian electronic currency operator, has studied how online payment behavior differs among particular groups of its customers, breaking their groups down by gender, occupation, mobile platform, and state of indebtedness. Data collection was arranged through Yandex’s own technology, Crypta, which can distinguish clusters according to categories of customers by relying on their online behavior.
Data included information about payments which users made via e-wallet, linked bank cards, and the Yandex.Money MasterCard (Yandex.Money has issued more than 400,000 physical bank cards and 10 million virtual cards).
Mobile Platform (iOS, Android)
Mobile payments are growing in Russia, with almost 40% of Russian Internet users using them, according to the above-mentioned TNS report. Almost one half (49%) of Internet users make payments through SMS, 55% pay with bank cards on their phones, and 61% utilize online banking apps.
On Yandex.Money specifically, the average payment amount made from an iOS smartphone or tablet is 21% more than from Android platforms. However, on average, Android users make four more payments per year than iOS users. Parallel to this, Android users are more likely to pay for computer games via e-wallet than iOS users (20% vs 17% of all Yandex.Money e-wallet users). Money transfers occur at the same level of frequency: 40% of online payments for users of either system are money transfers. In terms of share of spending, iOS and Android users both spend 20% of their online budgets on money transfers.
Loans
Yandex.Money users that have an outstanding loan spend 16% less online than those who have no loans. However, they still complete the same number of transactions. And 40% of each category of user prefers paying online by e-wallet. In addition, 20% of every group of users’ share of transactions through Yandex.Money is made up of money transfers.
Women and men
The payment practices of Yandex.Money users differ significantly by gender. Women make online payments 1.5 times as often as men. Women also make larger purchases online — 15% more than men — and are more likely to do their shopping at night (55% and 46% of transactions, respectively).Transfers are more popular among women than men (money transfers make up 23% and 19% of all online transactions, respectively). Interestingly, both categories of users make purchases using their Yandex.Money cards more often than bank cards linked to their e-wallet — women make 5% and 12%, respectively, and men 6% and 12%. All other payments are made directly via their e-wallet balance.
Occupation
Office workers make online payments on Yandex.Money twice as often as unemployed or students. Money transfers are the most popular among office workers (42%), followed by students (40%), and, finally, unemployed (37%).
Claiming 25 million user accounts — with about 15,000 new accounts opened daily, — Yandex.Money is the largest electronic payment services in Russia in terms of use, according to the TNS report, ahead of the WebMoney, PayPal and the Visa Qiwi payment services. In addition to its own e-wallet service, Yandex.Money offers a B2B payment solution (the ‘Yandex Payment Solution’), which enables online stores from across the world to accept online payments made by all popular methods in use in Russia and other CIS countries.
