The Worldpay from FIS 2020 Global Payments Report has predicted that digital wallets could account for more than half of global e-commerce sales by 2023. However, it also highlights a number of regional discrepancies.
In the US, for example, mobile wallets are set to surpass credit cards as the preferred online payment method by 2021, whereas Canadians are moving towards greater use of bank transfers. Digital wallets now surpass cash at the point of sale in Asia Pacific, but cash remains dominant in Latin America.
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Adam Beacroft, NatWest |
Eric Tak, global head of ING’s payments centre, observes that use of mobile wallets by corporates is very limited in continental Europe “mainly because card-based payments are not used widely in the region and mobile wallets typically support card payments,” he says. “We do not expect this to change dramatically in the coming years.”
Steve Murphy, director of the commercial & enterprise payments advisory group at Mercator Advisory Group, describes demand for mobile wallets in the commercial card space globally as “tepid”, although he expects an uptick when international business travel returns to something close to pre-coronavirus levels.
