42% of iPhone 6 owners in the U.S. say they’ve used Apple Pay

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Apple Pay is ready to dominate CurrentC.
Approaching half of iPhone 6 users have tried Apple Pay.
Photo: Wells Fargo

42 percent of iPhone 6 users in the U.S. have used Apple Pay, according to new research from analysts at the The Auriemma Consulting Group.

The same study suggests that Apple Pay is no one-off novelty either, since 84 percent of these users have used Apple Pay for more than three transactions in store, while 76 percent have used it to pay for items in-app.

Interestingly, the 42 percent of Apple Pay users is virtually identical to the number of users Auriemma recorded when it carried out similar bits of research in February and April.

While the number of places accepting Apple Pay has increased over the course of 2015, this would suggest that it is still largely the same early adopters who are using Apple’s mobile payments system — although it’s likely that more will be using it thanks to the arrival of the Apple Watch.

The Auriemma Consulting Group carried out its study by interviewing 500 iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners between May 29 and June 15. Given that Apple has sold well over 100 million iPhone 6 units by now around the world, if these figures prove representative in the U.S. — which remains Apple’s biggest market — that’s a whole lot of people using Apple’s payment platform.

It will be interesting to see how it compares to the first reports of Apple Pay adoption in the U.K, where the service just launched this month. The difference between the U.K. and U.S. is that users in the United Kingdom have been using NFC payments for a few years now. On the one hand, this makes Apple Pay less of a novelty, although it also means there’s far more existing awareness of NFC.

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