Apple Pay Statistics Australia - Usage Stats, Growth and Facts [2023 ]

Report Highlights

Apple Pay was launched in October 2014 following a long period of development as the giant tech company sought to incorporate payment start-ups and leading banks.
Customers using the service can conveniently pay their bills or complete other monetary transactions via the iOS app or the Safari browser.
Apple Pay is available in over 50 countries, including Australia.
As of 2018 December, Apple Pay had a user base of 43% of iPhone users.
Based on current figures and estimates, Apple Pay has been forecasted to control a tenth of global card payments by 2025.
90% of iPhones are compatible with Apple Pay.
According to the Federal Reserve Payments Study, a sum of $7.08 trillion was transacted on the platform in 2018.

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User Statistics in Australia

Apple Pay officially arrived in the Australian market late in 2015 following a partnership with American Express. Several major banks, later on, followed suit in supporting the service. While Samsung Pay and Google’s Google Pay have stood out as its main competitor, other services like Fitbit Pay and Garmin Pay have come up strongly.

About 90% of all Aussies own a smartphone, and three out of every five use their phones to make cashless payments.
As of March 2021, more than 40% of the combined debit and credit card numbers of contactless transactions in Australian banks were done through digital wallets.
Lifestyle, electronic devices, sports, and food & beverages top the industries in which Apple Pay services are used, at a combined score of 16%.
Apple Pay saw the highest penetration figures in 2020 at 6.5%, an increase from 4.1% recorded in 2019 and 3.7% in 2018.
Comparatively, Google Pay, a close competitor in the contactless payment industry, justified 4.1% in 2020, 3.6% in 2019, and 2.3% in 2018.
Samsung Pay, the third-largest financial service provider, offering contactless payment options to customers, recorded fairly static growth. In 2018, only 0.7% of the population had taken up Samsung Pay, a proportion which rose to 1.0% in 2019 and remained as such in 2020.

Apple Pay Usage Statistics within Different Age Demographics

The use of Apple Pay in Australia varies across the Aussie population, with the highest figures being recorded by the cohort aged between 18 and 40 years.

Only 3% of persons aged between 18 and 29 years were invested in contactless mobile payment methods in 2016. By 2019, this figured had risen to 18%.
There was a change from 6% to 18% for the number of persons between 30 and 39 years who used contactless mobile payments at least once a week in the same period.
When considering those between 40 and 49 years, the increase was from 5% to almost 9% between 2016 and 2019.
The only decline in usage between 2016 and 2019 was recorded by the cohort aged between 50 to 64 years, where there was a drop from about 6% to about 5.5%.
The figures for those above 65 years who use contactless mobile payment services consistently remained under 5% in the same period.

A Roy Morgan study revealed the following findings with regards to the use of contactless payment options in Australia:

The young people focused on trends and technology (defined as 200 Metrotechs by Roy Morgan’s Helix Persona) are the biggest consumers of contactless payment services, with 17% of them using either Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, or Google Pay.
Penetration of contactless payment methods is high in Australia. There is at least 1 contactless point of sale terminal (POS) for a stretch of every 25 citizens.

Impact of digital payment options

FIS Global Payments found that the number of contactless in-store payments (including figures for Apple Pay) made in 2020 exceeded physical payments. The total face-to-face payments fell by 50% in Australia.
The Coronavirus pandemic led to a spike in the adoption of Apple Pay to settle payments for goods and services. Merchants across Australia reported a 69% increase in transactions during this period.
According to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia data, the year-over-year comparison showed a 90% increase in digital wallet transactions as of March 2021.

The figure represented a surge from 36 million transactions in March 2020 to 68 million transactions in March 2021.

Digital wallets like Apple Pay saw debit card users move an average of AU$29 per transaction as of May this year. The figure for credit cards users under the same considerations was AU$44.

Banking, Provision of Service and Revenue

To provide services, Apple Pay leverages a user-friendly interface that allows customers to make their payments with ease.

Apple doesn’t charge its users any fees for using the Apple Pay service.
Apple Pay works with over 100 banks and card issuers in Australia.
Apple Pay’s heightened security protocols on transactions limit the volume of customer data stored on a merchant’s device to 65%.
Based on a controlled sample by Mozo, it was determined that 70% of bank account providers in Australia offer Apple Pay Services. Further, 70% of these banks support Google Pay services, while 55% have Samsung Pay services.
Apple Pay charges a 30% commission on payments made using the platform.
Affiliates that partner with Apple Pay get 1.8% of the transaction fee.
Apple Pay may require you to enter your PIN for purchases over a certain amount – $200 in Australia.
In 2018, Apple Pay, as a P2P payment system, was ranked best among similar providers with a score of 76%, excelling in data privacy and payment authentication.
As of 2019, Apple Pay’s peer to peer users contributed 15% to the overall P2P population.

What is Apple Pay?

Apple Pay is a digital payment and wallet service offered by Apple Inc. exclusively for consumers under the Apple banner. Initially only accessible via credit and debit cards in the US, Apple Pay has since expanded to several parts of the world, including Europe, The Middle East, Asia, South America, and Africa.

The launch of Apple Pay was meant to promote contactless payments, a nascent field at the time but whose development has been exceptional over the last few years. The service’s tremendous growth has more recently been seen with Apple Cash, an extension of Apple Pay, getting integrated to facilitate money transfer between users on iMessage. The latter is, however, only available to Apple users in the US.

User Statistics in Australia

Apple Pay Usage Statistics within Different Age Demographics

Impact of digital payment options

Banking, Provision of Service and Revenue

What is Apple Pay?

Sources