Security concerns hold back the progress of mobile commerce in Japan with the majority of consumers sceptical about allowing apps to store financial details, payment processor Worldpay said.

In a statement, Worldpay VP for Japan global enterprise e-commerce Hideya Komori noted high-profile security breaches had hampered the progress of mobile commerce.

The executive added, as a result, consumers were cautious about making any kind of transaction on their handsets. However, the company said the industry was still experiencing growth.

“While m-commerce is king around the world, there is a long way to go before it fully takes off in Japan,” Komori said.

The comments build on data released in Worldpay’s study on attitudes to transaction methods around the world, 2018 Global Payments Report, published in November 2018. It focuses primarily on shopping through mobile browsers rather than retail payments.

It found only 32 per cent of Japanese consumers supported the use of biometric data to accelerate payment and only 37 per cent were happy for apps to store payment details.

Despite perception issues, Worldpay expects transactions made on smartphones to comprise a quarter of all internet-based sales in the country by 2022.

The attitudes uncovered in the report fit with estimates from a collaboration led by Softbank which, on launching its PayPay mobile payments app in October 2018, said physical cash still made up 20 per cent of retail transactions in the country.