Mobile phone payments continued to grow in 2023

1 February 2024

By 2023, the use of mobile phones to pay has increased again. Almost four in 10 debit card payments at the checkout at the end of last year were made using a mobile phone or smartwatch. A year earlier, the figure was three in 10. Other payments, such as in online shops and between family and friends, are also increasingly made with a bank’s app on a mobile phone.

Factsheet betalingsverkeer 2023 van Betaalvereniging Nederland met toelichting en grafieken over groei van contactloos betalen met smartphone en betaalpas en de opmars van de betaalkaart in het OV.

Strong rise in debit and credit cards in public transport

Since June 2023, you can check in and out in public transport anywhere in the Netherlands with a contactless debit or credit card , even if it is virtually on a mobile phone or smartwatch. This payment option is firmly embraced: three out of ten travellers who check in for the basic fare (without discounts) now do so with a payment card, phone or smartwatch.

30% of public transport passengers who check in for basic fare use payment card

Steady increase in online payments

Almost three quarters of all payments in online shops were made with iDEAL and almost one in ten with a credit card by the end of 2023. The use of iDEAL for online payments will have increased by more than 10% by 2023. Meanwhile, 95% of those iDEAL payments are authorised with a mobile banking app.

Payment traffic grows across the board

Across the board, the number of payment transactions grew. Fast transfers, for example, increased by 8.5% and payments at the till by 6.5%. The split between electronic and cash payments at the counter looks set to remain the same in 2023*. As in the previous two years , 20% of all over-the-counter payments were settled in cash.

“The payment system has fully recovered from the corona pandemic,” says director Gijs Boudewijn of Betaalvereniging Nederland. “There are many new developments in the pipeline for the coming year, to keep cash readily available and accessible, to further harmonise payments within the EU, to reduce dependence on non-European providers and to properly safeguard the high availability and reliability of the Dutch payment infrastructure. With the still increasing digitalisation of payments, extra attention also needs to be paid to accessibility and inclusion, for people who cannot keep up.”

View the full factsheet on collective payments in 2023

*The share of cash payments at the counter compared to the total number of counter payments is a preliminary estimate based on partial measurements. Final figures will follow in April, in the 2023 Payments at the Counter report.