CBA sees Apple dominating digital wallets as contactless makes up 90% of card payments | ZDNet

According to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), Apple is enjoying 80% market share in the digital wallets space.

Responding to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services inquiry into mobile payment and digital wallet financial services, CBA said it has seen a rapid increase in the number and value of payments made from mobile devices.

“As of August, we estimate around 90% CBA credit and debit card payments made in-person were made contactless, rather than inserting, and approximately half of those contactless payments were made by digital device, rather than tapping a card. This means digital wallets are close to becoming the most popular way to pay in-person,” the bank said.

“Of the CBA digital wallet payments made by tapping a phone or related device, 80% are made using Apple devices (e.g. Apple iPhone, Apple Watch).”

Based on these numbers, CBA said it is likely indicative of the Apple’s share of payments made from mobile wallets in the country. The bank cited figures saying Apple’s share in the United States sat around the 92% mark.

See also: Cash payments plummet thanks to pandemic

The yellow and black bank added it has not seen any difference in the fraud rate between digital wallets on Apple devices and those on Android. It said based on its internal fraud data, fraud from all enabled third-party digital wallets constituted under 0.01% of total spending.

“The occurrence of fraud is extremely low, there is no material difference between the Apple Pay digital wallet hosted on Apple’s operating system when compared to Google Pay and Samsung Pay hosted on the Android operating system,” it said.

“All digital wallet providers must abide by minimum security standards developed by international card schemes (such as Mastercard and Visa) in order to become a certified digital wallet provider for card issuers globally.”

It added that both ecosystems have ways to minimise fraud, such as biometric authentication and tokenisation.

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