Another market survey, another few data points. MoneyZine writers Hideyuki Kato and Isamu Saito report some interesting results of 2 different cashless use surveys. As I reported a year ago, Apple Pay has brought a lot of changes to the Japanese payments market but it’s hard to make sense of it due to highly regional preferences: Suica is king in the Kanto area, ICOCA in the Kansai, and so on.
The 1st data point is a survey from Yumenomachi that ranks the different cashless payment methods:
- Credit cards: 88.4%
- Transit cards: 49.7%
- Apple Pay/Google Pay/Osaifu Keitai: 35.4%
- Prepaid Reward Cards (nanaco, WAON, Edy): 31.7%
- QR Codes (Line Pay, PayPay, etc): 25.6%
The 2nd data point is a survey from One Compath. This survey reports 56% of the respondents as using cashless more than a year ago, with slightly different ranking:
- Credit cards: 71.4%
- Transit cards: 31.7%
- Prepaid Reward Cards (nanaco, WAON, Edy): 53.0%
The 3rd data point from the same One Compath survey is very interesting but not surprising. It ranks prepaid card use separately for transit and reward cards by prefecture. Transit card use for payments in the Kanto Area (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba, Saitama) is 85%, while prepaid reward cards are the overall winner on a national basis. This is because of the reach of AEON supermarkets and convenience stores in rural areas where people don’t use transit cards or the local transit cards do not support purchases. The next generation Super Suica format is aimed specifically at incorporating these small rural area transit cards so they can be used anywhere as Suica.
One take away is that in the Kanto area Suica is easily the most used contactless card at checkout (Suica issuance is twice that of PASMO). Credit cards lead in cashless, but are still mostly swipe or Chip and PIN at checkout. When prepaid cards are totaled together, credit card and prepaid card use is almost equal. The surveys do not look at average purchase amounts for the different cashless methods. I suspect that Suica and other prepaid card use leads for smaller purchases while credit cards are used for larger purchase items.
We also know from a previous survey by IT journalist Sachiko Watanabe that most iPhone users do not use Apple Pay:
- Only 27% of iPhone users who can use Apple Pay use it
- 50% don’t use Apple Pay but are interested in using it
- 22% don’t use Apple Pay and don’t care about using it
These numbers jive with the 35.4% digital wallet use figure in data point 1. The short summary here is that there is still plenty of opportunity for Apple Pay to grow in the Japanese market, and the Super Suica format in 2021 has the potential to break down the regionality and shake up the market.
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