Apple Pay claimed 1% of November's digital payment dollars, new report says
A new report from ITG has revealed that Apple Pay was responsible for 1% of the total digital payment dollars spent in November. The study also found that 60% of new Apple Pay customers used the service multiple times throughout …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after launch, Apple Pay had no independent adoption data — only Apple's own anecdotes. ITG's November study supplies the first third-party read: a 1% share of all digital payment dollars, plus a 60% repeat-usage rate among new customers that speaks directly to whether the service was a novelty or a habit.
The number looks small, but the arc that follows it is steep: within weeks Apple Pay was credited with two of every three contactless payments on Visa, MasterCard and American Express, and the userbase estimates compound from there through the rest of the decade.
First-order effects
- Apple and its issuing-bank partners get their first hard usage benchmark two months post-launch, and the 60% multi-use finding lets the company argue habitual adoption rather than one-time curiosity.
Second-order effects
- Card networks see contactless volume concentrate around Apple's wallet almost immediately — the January figure of two-thirds of contactless spend on Visa, MasterCard and AmEx, later echoed by Tim Cook's 75%-of-US-contactless claim, shifts leverage toward whoever owns the device-side tap.
Third-order effects
- If the compounding holds, the wallet stops being a feature and becomes an installed-base business: analyst estimates track growth from tens of millions of users in 2018 — 38M US and 127M globally in February, rising to 215M globally by August — toward 507M users, roughly half the global iPhone base, by September 2020.
The trend: Smartphone makers are converting device install bases into default payment rails, with wallet adoption measured less by total digital spend than by share of contactless transactions.