Smartphone now king of retail payments – over half of contactless transactions made with mobiles

More than half of all contactless payments are now made using mobile wallets such as Apple Pay or Google Pay, rather than credit or debit cards, new data shows.
The payments monitor from the Banking and Payments Federation Ireland (BPFI), released on Friday, shows more than 1.4 billion contactless payments were made for goods and services in the first six months of this year. The payments totalled €24.8 billion and over half of them were made using mobile wallets.
The study shows that the smartphone has become the most popular way to pay for goods and services.
Head of payments at the BPFI Gillian Byrne said the volume of contactless card payments are rising “with some 86.1 per cent of all domestic point of sale card payments now contactless”. She pointed out the regional differences highlighted in the report with Dublin having 40 per cent above the national average of number of contactless payments per capita at 395.
Contactless payments cover all bank cards that have a contactless method of payment. Mobile wallets refer to online methods of payment, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay.
A person in Ireland made 142 payments on a mobile wallet in the first six months of the year, through either a smartphone or another mobile device such as a smartwatch.
The average spend on each mobile wallet was €18.93, 25 per cent higher than the average payment of a contactless card.
Dublin had the highest number of contactless payments per capita in the country, standing at 394. It had 39.6 per cent of all contactless payments recorded in the first six months and it accounted for the lowest average contactless payment in the State at €16.52.
Dublin was followed by Carlow at 329 payments per capita, Limerick at 287 and Waterford at 282.
Dublin and Carlow also claimed the top two spots for the highest mobile wallet usage in the State for the first six months of the year, coming in at 214 and 152, respectively.
Payment by mobile wallets was least common in Roscommon and Monaghan at 52 and 61 payments per person over the first six months of the year.
Some contactless cards have a limit on how much they can spend on each transaction. The average transaction value for contactless cards that do not have this limitation was €82.60 until June 2024.
The data shows 282 contactless payments were made per person in Ireland on an Irish card, coming to an average value of €17.05 million. Almost 1.5 billion contactless payments were made in total over the 12 months, valued at nearly €24.8 billion.
Ms Byrne said the BPFI sees a continuation of the trend towards digital and online payments “with consumer preference for frictionless, convenient and faster digital payment methods”.
Two thirds of adults say they use online banking every week, according to the Department of Finance’s Consumer Sentiment Banking Survey in August this year.