Almost half (48 per cent) of small businesses (SMEs) in the UK are using smartphones to accept or make payments over the internet and many more (a further nine per cent) plan to adopt the technology this year.

The statistics were revealed in a quarterly survey of SMEs by The Open University Business School, Barclays and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA).

Managing Director of Barclays Business, Steve Cooper, said: “Businesses are motivated by the ease, decreasing costs and the exceptional increase in power we're seeing in handsets.”We've reached a point where smartphones are running many of the applications that once needed a decently powered laptop. Businesses can log-on, make payments, send through an invoice, do their word-processing and catch up on emails while standing at a patisserie in Lille.

"With around half of businesses already accepting or making payments over the Internet, smartphone use looks set to accelerate the trend towards a cashless society."

The Open University Business School professor, Colin Gray, added: “These quarterly surveys in recent years have seen a strong trend towards the increased use of new ICT and online applications by growth-minded entrepreneurial firms. Britain needs to kick-start and sustain our economy on a longer term basis and technology could provide the answer.”

There are, however, signs of inflationary pressures revealed in the survey, with more small firms having increased than having cut their selling prices over the past year.

Businesses cite demand and the economic climate as their biggest problems, with 55 per cent placing these in the top three, followed by cash flow and late payment issues (31 per cent). Despite these difficulties, many businesses are still advertising for business. Some 40 per cent of all firms do not advertise at all, but of those that do well over half (57 per cent) advertise online, presumably lured by the relatively low costs, according to the survey.

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