The nation’s favourite choice for a way to make a payment appears to have changed from cash to debit card.
According to UK Finance (the trade body representing the banking & finance industry) debit card transactions have for the first-time overtaken cash with 13.2bn payments via debit card compared to 13.1bn cash payments in 2017.
Cash usage is declining by 15% year on year, though they still forecast that cash will be the second most frequent method of payment for at least the next 10 years.
The number of contactless payments increased by 97 per cent during 2017 to 5.6 billion.
Contactless cards will account for 36 per cent of all payments in 2027, up from 15 per cent in 2017.
There are 119m contactless payment cards in circulation. Almost two thirds (63 per cent) of people in the UK now use contactless payments, and significantly no age group or region falls below 50 per cent usage. There is no evidence as there is in other new payment methods of a “generational gap” or “regional gap” in the adoption of contactless cards.
Source: https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/
