Australian consumers have a growing interest in using smartphones to make payments, according to research released from Visa.

Research for Visa by UMR Strategic, shows Australians have high smartphone adoption with 70 per cent owning a smartphone and a 55 per cent interested in using their mobile to make purchases.

According to the research, the greatest barrier to shopping online is payment security, with 46 per cent of those surveyed having stopped a purchase when shopping online because they didn’t trust a merchant with their card details.

Stephen Karpin, group country manager for Visa in Australia, New Zealand, and South Pacific, said the smartphone will be at the centre of the Australian payment experience this year, both instore and online.

This year Visa will rollout in Australia ‘tokenisation’, an additional layer of security for mobile payments.

Tokenisation replaces the 16 digit card account number with a unique series of numbers that can be used for card payments in the digital world, without exposing a card holder’s more sensitive account information.

According to Karpin, Visa’s introduction of tokenisation this year will be key to assisting the next phase of digital payments.

“While tokenisation will be a largely invisible part of the payment process for Australian consumers, it will bring the benefit of added security to their digital payments. This is timely because Australians have proven to be a nation of early adopters with respect to payments innovation.”

“Just as 2014 was the year contactless payments reached mass adoption in Australia, with over 75 million Visa transactions taking place on tap and go each month, 2015 is poised to be the tipping point for mobile payments,” he said.

Australian merchants are aware of customer concerns when shopping online, with 87 per cent citing the importance of keeping customer credit card details secure as a high priority for their business. A further 84 per cent of merchants say an additional layer of security like tokenisation would be a positive development.

Tokenisation will protect merchants because payment information they hold will be replaced with a token, which can’t be used to transact outside of their authorised domain.

It also opens up the potential for a range of internet connected devices and wearables to become secure vehicles for commerce.

“Tokenisation will not only accelerate the move to mobile payments in Australia, but also provide a secure foundation for previously unimagined ways to pay. In the future, any internet-connected device could become a secure way to make payments,” said Karpin.