Latin America Mobile Payment Methods 2022

"The adoption of mobile wallets in Latin America is projected to rise, with Brazil and Mexico dominating the mobile wallet landscape": new yStats.com report.

Digital wallets are expected to witness solid growth in Latin America

Growing at a double-digit CAGR between 2022 and 2026, the digital wallet transaction worldwide are forecasted to reach a value of trillions of Euros by 2026, as revealed by the new yStats.com report. A similar trend was also observed in Latin America, with digital wallets estimated to be among the fastest-growing payment methods in the region. Within the region, Brazil and Mexico are projected to show tremendous growth in expansion in the use of digital wallets. For instance, mobile wallet users in Brazil in 2021 accounted for just a little more than one-third of the population, but the penetration of mobile wallet users in the country is forecasted to grow rapidly through 2025, to reach more than three-quarters of the population, as stated in the new yStats.com report. Furthermore, the value and volume of mobile wallet transaction in Brazil are also forecasted to surge at a robust CAGR between 2020 and 2025, with the value of mobile wallet transactions reaching a certain billion Euros by 2025, as reported in the new yStats.com publication. Similarly, in Mexico, the mobile wallet user penetration is projected to soar significantly, with over half of the population making use of mobile wallets by 2025. Moreover, in Mexico, the PayPal mobile wallet was used by online shoppers to pay for cross-border purchases in 2021. Nearly half of the online shoppers made their cross-border purchases using PayPal, followed by debit, and credit cards in 2021, according to the latest yStats.com publication. In Argentina, digital wallet was one of the most used payment methods among online shoppers, after credit cards in 2021.

Even though other economies in Latin America such as Columbia, Chile, and Peru seem to be catching up in terms of mobile wallets adoption and usage, some concerns remain

Although the use of mobile payment methods such as mobile wallets is accelerating in Latin America, the growth pattern varies across all the countries in the region, as revealed by the new yStats.com report. In Columbia for instance, the share of banked internet users making payments with wallets was relatively low as compared to debit/credit cards, P2P payments via apps, payment from account, and so on. Wallets were used by less than one-third of internet users as most of them were dependent on cash to make their payments. Nevertheless, the share of internet users using wallets grew significantly from 2020 to 2021. Similarly, in Chile, only about one in ten B2C E-Commerce purchases were made using electronic wallets in 2021. However, in Peru, digital wallets were estimated to show the strongest growth between 2020 and 2021. Despite the growing shift towards mobile and digital payments, consumers experience some concerns and challenges. In Brazil, a quarter of consumers did not use mobile payment app due to safety and security issues, with other reasons relating to lack of knowledge regarding its functionality, absence of credit card and smartphone, and so on, as mentioned in the new yStats.com report.