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CMSPI – IAC State of the Industry Report
CMSPI – IAC State of the Industry Report
Section 4.2.3 – Credit and Debit Cards in APAC A REGION OF DIVERSITY: DIGITAL WALLETS IN CHINA, CASH IN JAPAN, DEBIT IN AUSTRALIA AND CREDIT IN SOUTH KOREA APAC has a very diverse payments landscape, with each major economy exhibiting unique characteristics and very few regional dominant trends. In China, digital wallets WeChat and Alipay continue to dominate 139 (see Section 4.4), although cards still maintain around a third of POS spend. By contrast, Japan remains a cash dominated market, with very few debit cards at all. Australia and South Korea are two of the region’s card-dominated countries, and while 60% of all card transactions take place via debit cards in Australia, the South Korean card market is nearly 80% credit cards. 140 Meanwhile, in India, almost all of these trends are present; the continued growth of Unified Payments Interface ( UPI) (see Glossary) is driving market share for digital wallets, but cash and credit cards still constitute a significant portion of consumer spending. Section 4.2.4 – Credit and Debit Cards Summary Credit cards can be considered attractive for customers to use but they can also be high cost for merchants in many regions. By contrast, debit cards potentially provide merchants with a good competitive lever in the form of co-badging. With this in mind, some jurisdictions have sought to protect merchant debit co-badging and routing rights for cost control, redundancy, and efficiency (see Section 5.1.2). Section 4.3 – The Future of Cash As we saw in Section 4.1, despite a high-profile decline, cash continues to be a major spending method in many countries. Despite this, several governments are facilitating the move towards cashless societies through digitalization initiatives. Here, we’ll look into these trends across the world. Section 4.3.1 – Cash in the Americas CASH REMAINS STRONG IN MEXICO Cash remains the top preferred payment method in Mexico, where 39% of in-store transaction value in 2022 was paid with cash. Cash-based payment methods like Post-Pay (i.e., OXXO and 7-11) and cash-on-delivery still cover 8% of ecommerce values in the country. Brazil and Chile continue to show significant cash usage for POS spend, standing at 26% and 23% share, respectively (see Graph 4.3). However, these figures mark a substantial decrease for Brazil, where cash constituted 52% of POS spend in 2018.
card transaction usage over the past two decades. 133 Even in cash-heavy markets like Brazil and Mexico, debit represents a significant share for in-store and online spending (see Graph 4.3). The role of debit is especially important in geographies with domestic debit networks, including the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Chile, where access to domestic debit can offer unique features and savings for merchants, as discussed in Section 5.1.2 on co-badging oversight. Chile is an exception in the region in that debit surpasses credit for in-store spending, echoing government programs such as the launch of CuentaRUT in 2006, which assigned individual bank accounts for all natural persons to promote access to financial tools in Chile. 134 Section 4.2.2 – Credit and Debit Cards in EMEA DEBIT REMAINS ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR PAYMENT METHODS IN EMEA Although there are still cash heavy countries, such as Spain, in the EMEA region, debit cards continue to dominate as the top preferred in-store payment method. Debit cards are reported to account for nearly nine out of every ten cards in the European region as of 2022. 135 While the growth rate of debit cards has slowed in recent years, Europe’s debit card base grew by nearly 43 million cards in 2021, reaching a total of 813.5 million card holders, representing 1.31 debit cards per capita. 136 Additionally, purchase volume has grown nearly twice as fast as issuance. One unique feature of debit cards is that, unlike most other payment credentials, a single debit card is likely to offer the merchant multiple competing options for routing as many cards in the EU are co-badged with domestic and global card networks. Domestic card networks on the continent include Girocard in Germany, Pago Bancomat in Italy, Cartes Bancaires in France, Troy in Turkey, and Mada in Saudi Arabia. 137 Some cards also provide access to Single Europe Payments Area (SEPA)-based payment methods (see Glossary), which can act as a third competing alternative. 138 Read more about the role of co-badging and routing competition in Section 5.
133 https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fr-payments-study.htm 134 https://www.bis.org/ifc/publ/ifcb47i.pdf 135 https://www.paymentscardsandmobile.com/debit-cards-dominate-across-europe-as-cash-recedes-and- digital-grows/ 136 https://www.paymentscardsandmobile.com/debit-cards-dominate-across-europe-as-cash-recedes-and- digital-grows/ 137 Mada, the Saudi Arabia’s local debit card launched in 2015 by the Saudi Central Bank, processed 7.2 billion transactions during 2022, a 40% increase from 2021. However, these volumes are understated in Figure 8, due to many of these transactions being initiated through digital wallets. (Source) 138 https://www.smartpaymentassociation.com/liste-documents/public-resources/position-papers/785-27-04- 20-spa-instant-payment-card-initiative-v1-final/file
139 Dominance of WeChat Pay and Alipay in the Chinese Digital Payments Industry (focusfinance.org) 140 Euromonitor
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