For those executives who haven’t been watching the continued growth of Apple Pay, the recent metrics published by Capital One will make for stimulating reading.
The headline figure that most people picked up on was the $6 trillion figure – that’s right – Apple’s customers using Apple Pay purchased six trillion dollars worth of products and services during 2022.
The Capital One metrics also report revenue for Apple of $1.9 billion based on that transaction volume – which would chime with the rough payment fee structure we know most banks have implemented with Apple.
If you assume a US population of around 332 million (as reported by ‘the internet’ / Wikipedia), it’s stimulating to note that Capital One reports 50.8 million Apple Pay users in the country. That’s about 15% of the entire population.
If you take the entire population over 18 in the US, that’s about 258 million adults. That 50.8 million user base is then around 20% of the population.
No surprise, then, that Capital One also highlights Apple Pay is the most popular digital wallet in the US with a market share of 92%. In other countries this will be a wildly different figure – but in the context of the US, this is expected. Can you readily name another US digital payments ‘wallet’?
There is a constant concern expressed by many bank executives we speak to around whether they should be supporting the increasing dominance of a TechFin player such as Apple. Many we’ve spoken to in Western markets are privately highly critical of previous management who rushed to adopt Apple Pay – viewing this as an unnecessary surrendering of mindshare, attention and revenue to a player whose dominance is continuing to grow.
Others take a much more relaxed view, citing credit products that generate way more than the ‘billionth-of-a-cent’ (direct quote from one executive!) from an Apple Pay transaction. Mortgages, credit cards, credit lines/overdrafts and personal loans generally represent way more revenue than anything from day-to-day transactions.
We encourage you to read the full detail in the Capital One Shopping report here. And let’s see if the slightly anonymous ‘projections’ of 67 million Apple Pay users in the US by 2026 pan out. (Note, that would take that 20% figure to 26%…)