By 2025, nearly 5 billion digital wallets in the world

The study by mobile payment company Boku reveals that Southeast Asia will lead the way towards this transition, with overall growth expected to be 311% over the next five years. The rise of ecommerce and the dominance of super-apps like Grab and Gojek, particularly in markets like the Philippines and Indonesia, are just some of the drivers that are driving the adoption of digital payments in this region. . Latin America, Africa and the Middle East follow closely, especially in areas where wallets offer access to financial services for the underbanked. In this case, these are geographic areas that should expand their use of mobile wallets by 2025 by percentages ranging from 147% to 166%. In Africa and the Middle East, the adoption of these payment and management systems is mainly due to the ever-increasing use of mobile money services such as M-Pesa, which offer easy access to all ecommerce services. In Western Europe and North America, on the other hand, the movement towards digital wallets records more lukewarm data, marking increases of 65% and 50% respectively by 2025. The main reason for a less pronounced growth is generally understood to be the highs. levels of card penetration. Although, for the development of pandemic-spurred contactless adoption, Boku predicts that three quarters of Europeans will use a digital wallet by 2025. Boku CEO Jon Prideaux explained: “We are seeing a paradigm shift in payments driven. from digital wallets that have lowered the barrier to accessing electronic payments and introduced billions of new consumers to ecommerce. These consumers are not found in North America or Western Europe but rather in emerging markets and, although they do not have credit cards, they mostly use mobile wallets. For merchants around the world, embracing digital payments does not mean accepting one type of mobile wallet or another, but ensuring that consumers in every market have the solution they require to make transactions. “According to the data from the Innovative Observatory. Payments of the School of Management of the Politecnico di Milano in Italy cash is still the most widely used means of payment but digital transactions are on the increase, reaching one third of the total transacted, increasing the share from 29% of the previous year. Spending with digital tools reached a value of 268 billion euros, with 5.2 billion transactions. Contactless transactions are growing strongly, with + 29% reaching 81.5 billion euros and, above all, payments with smartphones and wearables (+ 80%) in stores, which exceed the value of 3, 4 billion.