New research says Apple Pay has already surpassed MasterCard in terms of annual transactions, and its $6 trillion total means it is more than halfway to tying Visa in terms of transaction volume. Since its launch in 2013, Apple Pay has seen rising adoption among users, banks, and retailers until 2021, when it accounts for 92 percent of all mobile wallet debit transactions.
Now, according to comparison site TradingPlatforms, Apple Pay is the second most popular digital payment system, behind Visa. the top-ranked Visa processes about $10 trillion worth of transactions annually, and Apple Pay more than $6 trillion.
This means that Apple Pay overall, including the Apple Card, for the first time surpassed MasterCard, which processes about $4.8 trillion worth of transactions. Apple Pay also beat out Alipay, which reportedly processes exactly $6 trillion worth of transactions.
Google’s G Play came in fifth place, with about $2.5 trillion in transactions.
“Apple Pay is increasingly becoming the payment method of choice for consumers and businesses,” said Edith Reads, a financial expert at trading platforms.” The fact that it now processes more transactions than MasterCard is a testament to its popularity.”
“Apple Pay has an advantage that other competitors don’t have, especially benefiting from their monopoly on iPhone NFC hardware,” she continued.” We expect Apple Pay’s popularity and market share to continue to grow over the next few years.”
The description of Apple beating MasterCard may be true, as the data available and the other three companies appear to be compared over the same period. However, while the data is said to be derived from Statista and calculated in terms of “annual transaction volume,” TradingPlatforms does not specify what period. Therefore, it is not clear whether this is for the last 12 calendar months or for an unspecified fiscal year.
