Apple Pay on pace to account for 10% of global card transactions

Apple’s mobile wallet is gobbling up a growing chunk of card payments around the world. As the service grows, it’s becoming a greater challenge to rivals like PayPal and attracting the attention of competition watchdogs.

Apple Pay accounts for about 5% of global card transactions and is on pace to handle 1-in-10 such payments by 2025, according to recent trend data compiled by Bernstein, a research firm. “There are indeed plenty of reasons to worry that Apple may attempt to disrupt the payments ecosystem,” Bernstein analysts, led by Harshita Rawat, wrote in a research note.

As iPhone sales plateau, the Cupertino-based company is leaning into its services division, which includes Apple Pay. The unit generated $12.7 billion in revenue in the last three months of 2019, a 17% increase from a year earlier. The company’s payments ambitions have the benefit of a massive cash hoard, years of experience in card transactions, and a vast customer base consisting of hundreds of millions of iPhone users.

The digital payments race is an immense opportunity, representing about $1 trillion in revenue around world. Visa and MasterCard process more than $14 trillion of payments each year and are still growing as more transactions go online, flow through apps, and as consumers in many parts of the world use cash less often.

Apple Pay makes money by taking a sliver of each transaction that runs through the device. Users can store their credit and debit cards on the wallet and use it to make contactless payments—beefed up with biometric security—through their phone’s near-field communication (NFC) tech. In the US, contactless payments are forecast to increase to $1.5 trillion in 2024, up from $178 billion this year, according to Juniper Research.

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Source: Apple Pay on pace to account for 10% of global card transactions — Quartz