Nearly 20% of all in-person Visa card transactions in the US are now contactless, with that proportion rising to more than 25% in Los Angeles, Detroit, Orange County, Miami and Salt Lake City, over 30% in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, and reaching 45% in New York, according to the card network’s Q1 2022 earnings call.

Visa also reported that nearly one in four face-to-face card payments in Brazil were contactless (24%), a rise of 19 percentage points from 5% for the previous year and that tap-to-pay transactions in India have “nearly doubled” to 16% between 2019 and the end of the 2021 fiscal year.

In addition, the card network identified growth in the buy now, pay later (BNPL) sector with “BNPL fintechs increasingly using Visa virtual cards to settle with merchants, driving triple-digit payments volume growth year-over-year in the United States,” Visa CEO Alfred Kelly said during the call.

“BNPL fintech consumers also continue to use their cards to pay off their instalments with active cards growing 50% in the same period.”

The launch of the Visa Installments payment service in Canada that enables consumers to choose to pay for purchases in instalments over a specific period of time now has “commitments from issuers and acquirers representing the majority of payments volume”.

Crypto capabilities

Visa will also “continue to lean into the crypto space” and “innovate around our settlement and crypto AP capabilities”, including the development of central bank digital currency (CBDC) capabilities, Kelly said.

“Earlier this month, we previewed CBDC payment APIs currently in development, which would enable central banks to connect their Ethereum-based CBDCs with Visa rails through a wallet with digital issuance capabilities, enabling consumers to spend with CBDCs at any Visa merchant.

“We partnered with Consensys to develop this concept, which was selected as one of the winning entries out of 300 ideas from 50 countries at the Global CBDC Challenge, as part of the Singapore FinTech Festival judged by representatives from the IMF, the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements and the central banks of Brazil, India, Kenya, and Indonesia.”

Mastercard reported that one in two in-person card transactions it processed worldwide during Q4 2021 were contactless during its earnings call last month.

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