daniel chigunwe
Growth in digital wallet usage in SA’s biggest cities outpaces that of developed markets, latest research reveals.
Digital wallets remove the risk of physical theft or loss. Image: Anthony Kwan/Bloomberg
South African consumers have led the shift towards using digital wallets to pay for goods and services, according to the SpendTrend24 report compiled by Discovery Bank and Visa.
South Africans’ use of digital wallets benchmarks well against their global counterparts, with an impressive nine percentage point increase between 2022 and 2023.
Discovery Bank and Visa analysed spending data from 14 cities worldwide, including South African metros such as Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg.
The analysis also includes five emerging market cities and six developed market cities. The selected international cities have a combined population of over 100 million and a GDP of nearly $4 trillion.
The report analysed over 60 million credit cards and more than 13 billion transactions between 2019 and 2023.
The usage of digital wallet growth in South Africa’s three biggest cities was way higher than in other world cities used in the analysis. In Durban, it has grown by 47 percent, in Cape Town by 45% and in Johannesburg by 42 percent.
This is significantly above cities in developed markets. In places such as Los Angeles and San Francisco in the US, growth in digital wallet spending was 13% and 9%, respectively, and in Sydney, Australia it was 12 percent.
According to the report, the surge in digital wallet usage is driven by the fact that this mode of payment eliminates the need to carry a physical wallet. It also offers easy payment tracking and convenience. – Moneyweb
Online Reporter