Fear is a powerful and oft-misunderstood force. Personally, I’m going through powerful changes in understanding the irrational and and debilitating impact it can have, by going deep to understand things that I need to courageously face head-on. Similarly, here’s how fear affects consumers when it comes to adoption of technologies we focus on:

Online shopping: by nearly a 4:1 margin, consumers are not buying online because they are fearful of becoming a fraud victim. And this fear is irrational, because keeping your payment card off the Internet generally has nothing to do with how your information got compromised int he first place!

Mobile banking: with just 6 out of 100 online consumers actively using mobile banking, fear is a huge deterrent to higher use. Yet mobile banking has many powerful security advantages that need to be understood and integrated.

Internet banking: a tired old urban legend says that consumer fear is, net-net, holding back current online banking usage. Certainly among those that aren’t banking online fear is a deterrent, but by a wide margin more consumers are actually visiting their bank or credit cards more frequently in specific response to fear, because fearful people crave status information (and the Internet is the most accessible way to get at it for financial accounts)

Bottom line, fear affects consumer or even small business finance technology usage, but often in irrational ways. The more financial providers understand and communicate customer attitudes, behaviors and the multi-channel nature of criminal activity, the better off we’ll all be.