Mobile Payments App Revenue and Usage Statistics (2024)

David Curry

Updated: October 7, 2024

Mobile payments apps are used by more than two billion people globally, with millions more coming online each year.

In India, South-east Asia and South America, some of the younger generation skipped the usual process of owning a credit or debit card, in favour of using mobile apps.

Adoption of mobile payments is weakest in developed nations, such as Germany and France, which are finding it hard to ditch cash and cards. Even in the United States, adoption rates trail developing nations by a considerable percentage, although Nordic countries have seen a rapid adoption of mobile payments over the past decade.

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Outside of China and India, most mobile payment solutions mimic regular card readers, which use near-field communication (NFC) to send digital payments to card readers. Apple Pay and Google Pay are the two largest mobile payment solutions globally, with PayPal a distant third.

Apps such as Cash App and Venmo were built specifically for the younger generation in the US a decade ago, when it was difficult to send mobile payments to friends and family. Regional varieties of this include GrabPay (South-east Asia), SadaPay (Pakistan) and PicPay (Brazil).

In China, two national giants provide the payment services for the country. These are AliPay and WeChat Pay, and they command about 90% of the market. AliPay is the default service for Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao, the two largest e-commerce platforms in the country. WeChat Pay is the default service for WeChat, the country’s most popular social app.

In India, there is a three way competition for market share between Paytm, PhonePe and Google Pay. PhonePe has accelerated through its early adoption of UPI, India’s national bank interface system, which is the most popular way to transact in the country.

With mobile payment adoption expected to continue to grow at a steady rate over the next decade, leaders in a specific country or region could see remarkable revenue growth. Current leaders are building out their platforms in an attempt to create the new wave of fintech products.

We have collected data and statistics on mobile payments. Read on below to find out more.

Key Mobile Payments Statistics

Mobile payments transaction volume reached $2.3 trillion in 2023, a 16.6% annual increase
Over two billion people used mobile payments in 2023
Zelle is the most popular non-NFC mobile payments service in the United States
AliPay and WeChat Pay, the two Chinese mobile payment services, have the most total users

Finance App Report 2024

Want to learn more about the finance app industry? In our Finance App report, we cover financials, forecasts, usage, downloads, demographics and benchmarking data.

Top Mobile Payments Apps

Link	Title	Description
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/#:~:text=Apple%20Pay%20active%20users	Apple Pay	Outside of China, Apple Pay has the largest transaction volume of any mobile payments service
https://pay.google.com/intl/en_uk/about/	Google Pay	Android's default mobile payments solution, responsible for about 50% of all mobile transactions on Android
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/paypal-statistics/	PayPal	Online payments stalwart which was the dominant platform for payments during the web age
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/cash-app-statistics/	Cash App	Square's own payments super-app, which began life as an easy way to send friends money on mobile
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/venmo-statistics/	Venmo	At a time when mobile payments were non-existent in the US, Venmo paved a way with its mobile app
https://www.zellepay.com/	Zelle	A collaborative effort by the major US banks to curtail Venmo and Cash App's growth
https://www.samsung.com/uk/samsung-pay/	Samsung Pay	A distant third in comparison to Apple and Google Pay, but relatively popular with Samsung mobile owners, especially in South Korea
https://global.alipay.com/platform/site/ihome	AliPay	The largest mobile payments platform in the world and default payments platform for Alibaba's ecommerce services
https://pay.weixin.qq.com/index.php/public/wechatpay	WeChat Pay	Second largest payments platform in China, which is the default payment method on WeChat
https://wise.com/money-transfer-app	Wise	Money transfer service Wise has flipped the market on its head with super-cheap international transfers
https://www.phonepe.com/	PhonePe	Flipkart-backed mobile payments service, which has over 300 million users in India

Mobile Payments Transaction Volume

Mobile payments transaction volume reached $2.3 trillion in 2023. Most of the revenue is generated from the small interchange fees that each vendor charges per transaction.

Mobile payments transaction volume 2015 to 2023 ($bn)

Mobile Payments Users

The number of mobile payments users shot up during the pandemic, but that growth has cooled considerably in 2022 and 2023.

Mobile payments users 2015 to 2023 (mm)

Mobile Payments Adoption by Country

Denmark has the highest mobile payments adoption, at 81.5%. China and Sweden are tied second with 79.3% adoption rate.

Mobile payments adoption by country 2023 (%)

Mobile Payments TPV in US

For mobile payments that don’t involve NFC, Zelle, a cooperative mobile app owned by the big banks, is ahead of Venmo and Square in total payment volume.

Mobile payments TPV in US 2016 to 2023 ($bn)

Mobile Payments Market Share China

AliPay and WeChat Pay are a duopoly in the mobile payments market in China. AliPay is the primary service for Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms, while WeChat Pay is default on WeChat and its thousands of mini-programs.

Mobile payments market share in China 2023 (%)

Mobile Payments Market Share India

Mobile payments are structured differently in India, with the National Bank of India deploying a Unified Payments Interface, which has become the most popular way to transact in the country. PhonePe leads this market by a considerable margin.