By 2026, nearly 30% of US consumers’ average retail spending (excluding food and beverage sales and ticketing) will be made using proximity mobile payments, as providers look to build on the pandemic-driven adoption of the technology.

It launched the standalone Google Wallet, and a new Chrome feature lets online shoppers convert their cards to virtual cards.

EU probing Apple Pay: Restricting access to key NFC technologies on iPhones prevents EU banks from providing payment solutions, limiting competition. Mounting scrutiny could alter the duopoly’s payments dominance.

Google hired former PayPal exec Arnold Goldberg to lead its payments division following last year’s struggles with employee turnover within payments.

Shake-ups in the new year will include hyper-personalization, tech companies venturing further into embedded finance, and the prospect of super apps in Western countries.

After a leadership change and multiple delays, the tech giant won’t offer co-branded bank accounts through its digital wallet. But its Plan B could be a problem for banking as a service firms.

The top 10 P2P payment apps worldwide

Google eyes Japanese payments acquisition: The tech giant is in negotiations to buy cashless payments startup pring, which could help strengthen its business in Japan as the country begins to embrace digital payments.

For some time now, consumers have been moving toward demanding more frictionless payment methods across online and offline channels. The social distancing and sanitizing practices brought on by the pandemic proved to be the push that encouraged many consumers to try proximity mobile payments (paying for goods using a mobile phone as a physical POS) for the first time. Ecommerce retailers, not to be outdone, are finding ways to improve their transactions as well.

The pandemic not only altered consumers’ shopping behaviors, but it also changed how they pay for goods and services.

Google’s update to Google Pay includes enhancements to its Google Plex bank account—as big tech companies dive into banking, it jeopardizes the value proposition of digital-only banks like Chime and Varo.

The coffee chain leading the mobile payments game

The pandemic accelerated the adoption of mobile payment platforms (used at point-of-sale), as Americans sought out retailers offering contactless services. As a result, user and transaction value growth have accelerated.

US bank branches are still shuttered amid the pandemic, but consumers are more likely to conduct their banking online, according to recent research.

The US has been relatively late in introducing contactless cards, which are credit or debit cards that include a near field communication (NFC) chip that can complete a transaction simply by tapping on a reader. But those cards are starting to arrive in the US now that most point-of-sale (POS) systems have the NFC capabilities to accept them.

Apple Pay’s dominance and increasing store adoption of mobile proximity payment technology is driving growth in transaction volume in the US, new eMarketer estimates show. This year, we estimate that mobile proximity payment transactions will total $98.88 billion this year, growing another 31.8% to $130.36 billion next year.

Canada is classified as a “high-adoption” country in our global mobile payments forecast.

People in France were early adopters of smart payment cards, including chip-and-PIN and contactless technology. That has stifled proximity mobile payment adoption, with just 15.6% of France’s smartphone users expected to pay with their phone in-store in 2019.

Less than 13% of smartphone users in Germany will use proximity mobile payments this year—one of the lowest rates in Europe. User numbers will increase slowly, but privacy concerns and the popularity of cash and card payments will curtail adoption.

The global payment market will hit a major milestone in 2020: 1.06 billion people are expected to make a proximity mobile payment. But even as countries like China and Sweden take steps toward a cashless society, most of the world will still rely on cash and cards.