Visa recorded over three billion contactless payments in Europe over the last 12 months.
In the last year contactless payments have come to account for one in five Visa card payments, compared to one in 60 in 2013. During that time the bank increased its number of contactless terminals in Europe by 23%, reaching 3.2m, with plans to convert all terminals to contactless by 2020.
“The last 12 months has seen contactless payments continue its extraordinary growth,” said Tristan Kirchner, European Product Director at Visa.
“With contactless cards, rather than cash, becoming the preferred way to pay for smaller purchases there was been a dramatic drop in the average value of a card transaction in recent years,” said the UK Cards Association‘s Head of Policy, Richard Koch.
Figures from the UK Cards Association show that there are around 84.2m contactless cards in the UK, as of February 2015. Along with Poland and Spain the UK has embraced contactless payments, with the country‘s most popular contactless merchants including Tesco, McDonald‘s and transport services in London. In April contactless adoption skyrocketed 300%, reaching 153m transactions in April 2016, compared to 51m the year before.
“Contactless cards are also being used to pay for travel and to donate to charity and as technology evolves, there will be even more environments in which to use contactless,” Koch continued.
