How the World Pays: Payment Methods by Country and Region

Oct 10

3 min read

In London, you tap your phone. In Shanghai, you scan a QR code. In São Paulo, you fire off a Pix. In Lagos, you transfer straight from your banking app. Same coffee, four completely different journeys.

The big picture: digital wallets now carry 56% of the world's e-commerce value and 33% of in-store spend, according to Worldpay's Global Payments Report 2026. But "wallet" means very different plumbing depending on where you're standing. Let's take a trip.

The global picture in four lines

Wallets lead online (56% of e-commerce) and are catching up in store (33%). Together that's over $13.8tn of spend.
Cards are becoming infrastructure. They still drive about 48% of in-store and 31% of online value directly, and they fund most Western wallets underneath.
Account-to-account (A2A) is local. It's single digits globally but 20%+ in Latin America and around 15% in the Middle East and Africa, wherever a strong national instant rail exists.
Online is growing faster than in-store (about 7.5% a year vs 3.4%), so the future skews digital.

Country snapshots

Market	Wallet share: online	Wallet share: in store	What really drives it
China	89% (two wallets)	87%	Alipay and WeChat Pay; QR codes everywhere
India	68%	61%	UPI, the state-built instant rail; PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm sit on top
Germany	52%	n/a	PayPal (cited by 70% of online shoppers); BNPL/invoice is 18% of e-commerce
Hong Kong	41%	45%	Wallets overtook cards for the first time in 2025
United Kingdom	40%	n/a	Apple Pay and Google Pay on top of debit cards; cards still 46% online, 69% in store
United States	39%	17%	Credit cards and rewards culture keep plastic dominant in store
Brazil	Pix: 42%	Pix: 34%	Pix, the central bank's instant rail, used by almost every adult

Source: Worldpay Global Payments Report 2026 (2025 data, share of transaction value).

Region by region

United Kingdom. A card nation going mobile. Debit cards made 26.6bn payments in 2025, over half of everything. Faster Payments (6.2bn) is now the second most-used method, ahead of credit cards and Direct Debit. Cash has slipped to fifth, about 8% of payments, down from 45% in 2015. Watch pay-by-bank, pushed by the government's National Payments Vision.

Europe. A patchwork of national favourites:

Netherlands: iDEAL (bank transfer) dominates online checkout, now being folded into Wero.
Poland: BLIK, a six-digit code from your banking app.
Germany: PayPal and invoice (Kauf auf Rechnung); girocard in store.
Nordics: Vipps MobilePay and Swish for everything person-to-person.
Spain / Portugal: Bizum and MB WAY for P2P and growing online.
Belgium / France: Bancontact and Cartes Bancaires co-badged cards.

North America. Credit cards rule thanks to rewards. Wallets are big online (39%) but only 17% in store. Zelle handles P2P; FedNow is still early.

Latin America. The A2A champion. Pix in Brazil is now accepted in Argentina, Chile, Portugal, Spain and the US. Instalments on cards (parcelado) are a cultural norm, and cash vouchers like Boleto and OXXO (Mexico) still serve the unbanked.

Asia-Pacific. The world's QR laboratory. Beyond China and India, look at PromptPay (Thailand), QRIS (Indonesia), PayNow (Singapore) and DuitNow (Malaysia), increasingly linked to each other across borders. Japan is the exception: still cash- and card-heavy, with convenience-store (konbini) payments online.

Middle East. Card-led and fast-moving: mada in Saudi Arabia, very high Apple Pay adoption in the Gulf, and new instant rails such as Saudi Arabia's sarie and the UAE's Aani.

Africa. Mobile money and bank transfers, not cards. M-Pesa dominates Kenya and Tanzania; Nigeria runs on instant bank transfers (NIP), USSD codes and POS agents; Ghana's MoMo and South Africa's PayShap are growing.

What this means if you're building

There is no global checkout. Plan the top two or three local methods per market, not just cards.
Wallets are the front door. Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal are table stakes in the UK, US and Europe.
A2A follows the rail. Where a national instant rail exists (Pix, UPI, Faster Payments), A2A eventually wins share.
BNPL now lives inside wallets. It's a checkout feature, not a separate brand.