Consumer Data: Factors Impacting Millennial and Gen Z Debit Card Use
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After years of credit card dominance and marketing campaigns designed to attract credit card customers, Americans are now leaning into debit card use. In fact, according to a Forbes banking survey, 57% now say debit cards are their preferred primary payment method.
While many of these transactions relate to traditional points of sale, increasing digital payments online and via mobile apps are opening fresh ways for consumers to use their debit cards. These expanded debit card use scenarios – such as peer-to-peer payments, recurring subscriptions, rent payments and more – are creating new opportunities for debit card issuers to engage with their customers.
To compete effectively for this customer engagement, issuers must understand the evolving trends, like those captured in Media Logic’s recent Consumer In Sight (CiS) report.
For our “Debit Card Nontraditional Use: 2024 Survey,” we surveyed Millennial and Gen Z consumers to understand the sentiments, attitudes, current usage patterns and factors impacting the novel use of debit cards. Here’s what we found:
- Beyond traditional retail points of sale, Millennial and Gen Z consumers use their debit cards similarly—most frequently for bill payments.
- The next most frequent nontraditional debit card uses were for contactless transactions, subscriptions and mobile wallets.
- Payment urgency was a top reason consumers started using their debit cards for nontraditional purposes.
- Compared to budget control and security, convenience was stated as the top reason for continued novel debit card use by a factor of about 2X or more.
- When using social media channels and mobile apps, Millennials and Gen Z consumers chose debit cards because they provide the ability to send money via their preferred messaging service.
Overall, there are similar behavioral patterns and few notable gaps between Millennial and Gen Z consumers regarding their use of debit cards for new use cases. However, survey results do reveal some generational differences, including:
- Millennials use debit cards more than Gen Z for bill payments and healthcare expenses.
- Payment urgency had a more significant influence on Millennials than Gen Z, whose novel debit card use was somewhat more impacted by education, bank ads, customer communications and friends and family – an insight debit card issuers can leverage for referrals.
