Card Expenditures To Top $45 Trillion by 2023, With Contactless Boosting the Total, RBR Says

While global card expenditures will increase 80% to $45 trillion by 2023 from $25 trillion in 2017, growth in the United States will be slow compared to other regions because the U.S. is already a well-developed market, says RBR Research in its “Global Payment Cards Data and Forecasts to 2023” research report.

Released Monday, the report forecasts that global card expenditure will grow at an average of 10% per year through 2023. The average value of a payment will fall from $67 to $62 over the same period, owing to the influence of contactless cards.

The U.S. market is embarking on another contactless card push as issuers such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and American Express Co. convert their portfolios to dual-interface EMV cards.

“Growth in North America will be relatively slow compared to other regions, largely because the USA and Canada are already well-developed payments markets,” Daniel Dawson, the RBR report author, says in an email to Digital Transactions News.

“However, the mass issuance of contactless cards in the U.S. will likely see a continued fall in the average value of a card payment as more and more consumers use cards for low-value payments such as drinks, snacks, etc.,” he says. “More generally, we do see contactless replacing cash in situations such as these, especially where contactless payments are encouraged by merchants, but there will of course still be a significant proportion of the population which prefers to use cash.”

Much of the growth in card expenditures will be in developing markets where there is a significant unbanked population, Dawson says, while more consumers are “becoming increasingly comfortable using cards in place of cash.”