China has the largest mobile payment scale in the world, but it is not the most developed country without cash payment.
Our wallets will eventually shrink more and more, regardless of whether the salary rises or not. Today, when roadside stalls are all paid by scanning code, fewer and fewer people will go out with a lot of cash.
The trend of cashless society is spreading all over the world. Recently, consulting firm Capgemini and BNP Paribas jointly released the World Payments Report 2018, which counts the cashless transactions in many countries around the world.
According to the report, in the reporting period (2016), the country with the largest number of cashless transactions was the United States, ranking first with 148.5 billion transactions, the euro zone ranked second with 74.5 billion transactions, and China, with the most developed mobile payment, ranked third with 48 billion transactions.
Although the number of cashless transactions in China is less than one third of that in the United States, the growth rate of the share of cashless transactions ranks second in the world. The report predicts that by 2021, the total amount of cashless payment transactions in China will surpass that in the United States and become the first in the world.
In terms of per capita times, Sweden has become the country with the largest number of per capita non-cash payments with 461.5 per capita electronic transactions. Sweden was the first country to print paper money, but it may also be the first country to eliminate cash. There is another interesting true story about the cashless society in Sweden:
A man broke into a bank. "robbery! I want cash! The bank clerk gave him a cold look, pointed to a sign on the wall saying "no cash place" and told him that the bank had no cash and his demands could not be met. The robber was puzzled. Before leaving, he asked the staff, "Where else can I go? 」
The report pointed out that the rapid growth of cashless payment in China benefited from the large popularity of mobile payment. A report by Better Than Cash Alliance, a subsidiary of the United Nations, pointed out that the market size of social network payment (Alipay and WeChat) in China reached 2.9 trillion US dollars in 2016, which increased 20 times in the past four years. At present, Alipay and WeChat payment have occupied more than 90% of the mobile payment market in China.
▲ Annual transaction amount of China Mobile Payment.
In recent years, people in China have also strongly felt the convenience brought by mobile payment. From eating, shopping, watching movies, buying food in the vegetable market to taking the bus and subway, you can basically use mobile payment to solve all the consumption scenarios you can think of.
▲ Image from: Wall Street Journal
Capgemini predicts that the global digital transaction volume will increase from $598 billion to $876 billion between 2018 and 2021. In Asia, led by China, digital payment will lead the world with a compound growth rate of 29% in the next four years, while the growth rates in North America and Europe are much slower, both less than 10%.
In fact, in terms of the scale of mobile payment, China is already the first in the world. According to the data of Forrester Research, in 2016, the mobile payment market in China reached 9 trillion US dollars, the mobile payment market in the United States reached 112 billion US dollars, and the mobile payment market in China was nearly 90 times that in the United States. In 2017, the scale of mobile payment transactions in China has exceeded 200 trillion yuan, ranking first in the world.
But why in Capgemini’s report, the United States is the largest country without cash payment. This is related to the statistical method of the report. In addition to mobile payment, the "no cash" in the report also includes cheque, debit card, credit card payment, credit transfer and direct debit transactions.
It is not difficult to explain why the United States, where mobile payment is underdeveloped, still has the largest cashless transaction volume in the world. The United States has a mature credit card system, and credit cards have become the most mainstream payment method for the American people, with 40% of the total global credit cards coming from the United States.
However, the high maturity of the credit card system has greatly inhibited the development of mobile payment in the United States. A large number of concessions are tied to credit cards, and the American people have no incentive to loosen their credit cards at all.
The development of mobile payment in China far exceeds that in Europe and America. A deeper reason is that China consumers have not formed the habit of credit card consumption, and it is easier to accept mobile payment. According to a report by Goldman Sachs, China people have an average of 3.6 debit cards, but only one third of them have credit cards, which forms two extremes with the United States.
In addition, Apple CEO Tim Cook also talked about China Mobile Payment in an exclusive interview with Ai Faner some time ago. He put forward a novel point of view:
China has not experienced the so-called desktop Internet stage, but embraced the mobile Internet directly, so consumers in China do not have the burdens of the desktop Internet era in their minds, which explains to some extent why the mobile payment share in China is so high.
If the lack of credit card consumption habits is the core reason for the rapid development of mobile payment in China, then the popularity of smart phones and 4G networks has cleared the last obstacle and reconstructed the whole offline consumption scene with the help of QR codes.
A colleague of Ai Faner once encountered a strange thing when she was shopping. When she took out a hundred-dollar bill to pay the bill, the cashier froze for a few seconds because no one had paid in cash for too long.
When was the last time you spent money in cash?
The title map comes from: