Payments 2025 and Beyond: Exploring Future Trends in Payments

Pay for bus tickets with text messages in Türkiye, buy groceries with QR codes in China, or tap your phone at a point-of-sale terminal in the United States.

Even before the pandemic, these ways of paying for goods and services were evidence of a steady shift toward digital payments that could eventually lead to a cashless global society. According to PwC analysis, global cashless payment volumes will grow more than 80% from 2020 to 2025, from about 1 trillion transactions to nearly 1.9 trillion transactions, and nearly triple by 2030.

Asia Pacific will see the fastest growth, with cashless transactions increasing by 109% between 2020 and 2025 and by 76% between 2025 and 2030, followed by Africa (78%, 64%) and Europe (64%, 39%). Latin America will follow closely behind (52%, 48%), with the United States and Canada seeing the slowest growth (43%, 35%).

This means that by 2030, the number of cashless transactions per capita in each region will be roughly two to three times the current level.

Trends Driving M&A Activity

Consolidation is a U.S.-led trend, led by the pursuit of domestic scale and culminated in three landmark multi-billion dollar deals in 2019: Global Payments’ acquisition of TSYS; Fiserv’s acquisition of First Data; and FIS’s acquisition of Worldpay.

Another trend is spreading in the United States and Europe. For example, Italian payment processor Nexi acquired Danish competitor Nets in 2020 to form a pan-European merchant services company; French company Worldline acquired Switzerland-based SIX payment services in 2018 and acquired Ingenico in the same year.

Card networks are getting closer to users. This trend began with Mastercard’s acquisition of UK-based Vocalink in 2016, followed by its acquisition of Nets’ account-to-account business in 2020, the year Visa also attempted to acquire open banking aggregator Plaid.

Global mobile wallets and “super apps.” A nascent theme could become one of the biggest. Alipay has been seeking to make inroads into the global mobile wallet market, with multiple investments in domestic mobile wallets and franchises in Asia. Big tech companies are also investing in the world’s leading payment technology.

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