Expert Market Examines the Mobile Payments / Cashless Market in Europe

August 22, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

The mobile payments market for even the last few months, let alone the last few years, has been packed with new developments that have paved the way for big gains in use as well as sheer amounts of cash moved through it. A new report sent our way from Expert Market, meanwhile, filled us in as to just how far this market is going and where it might yet go.

The Expert Market report considered overall numbers of cashless transactions, along with total digital payment revenue, to produce its insights. One of the biggest points from the study noted that the UK is Europe’s current leader in the cashless stakes, a point that’s likely familiar ground to those who have been following the European mobile payments market for a while.

The UK also tops the ranks in the overall number of cashless payment transactions, and its nearest competitor, Germany, was almost 50 percent under the UK’s figures, the report noted. The farthest behind digitally in Europe is Malta, reports note, which processed fully 535 times the cash transactions that the UK did.

Interestingly, the Nordic region-including Denmark, Norway and Sweden-was actually significantly behind both German and the UK in terms of total cashless payment transaction count. The Nordic region was actually behind France as well, the report noted, which was likely owing to the countries’ smaller population counts rather than a lack of fervor in the overall cashless concept.

In many ways, the Expert Market study reinforced several points we’d known for some time about the mobile payments and cashless payments markets. The UK is the clear frontrunner, major European economies are following in tow, and the Swedish cashless society really only represents so much of the overall economy therein. If these trends continue, even a cashless Sweden won’t bring it into the top three, and no matter what the rankings say, cashless and mobile payments are likely to continue being a major part of the European economy for some time to come.

Getting the concrete numbers on the European cashless economy, though, is certainly welcome, and Expert Market has illustrated wonderfully just how far this field actually runs.