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Based on the monthly number of daily active users (DAU) throughout 2018, Bancontact was Belgium’s most popular mobile payment app. Bancontact is a payment scheme local to Belgium and processed nearly *** billion transactions in 2018. It uses debit cards from over ** Belgian banks, and can be used for both in-store card transactions as well as online payments. When it comes to performing mobile payments, most banks in Belgian recommended their customers to use the Bancontact app as domestic online banking apps do not have a payment option!

Two can play that game: Payconiq by Bancontact

Payconiq, another popular mobile payment app in Belgium, originally comes from Luxembourg and is a mobile money transfer app that allows people to pay their friends, to pay their bills or to pay on a website. ING Belgium introduced the smartphone app in 2015, with KBC and Belfius joining in 2017. More than *** million transactions were processed by the P2P app in 2018. In the summer of 2018, Payconiq Belgium merged with the above mentioned payment system Bancontact into Bancontact Payconiq Company. The same happened to the two separate apps in 2019: they merged into one app called "Payconiq by Bancontact". This merger is not yet reflected in this statistic.

How about digital wallets in Belgium?

Belgium has support for both Google Pay (since 2017) and Apple Pay (since November 2018, exclusively for customers of BNP Paribas Fortis and its daughters). Domestic sources claimed in early 2019 that Apple's mobile payment system was more popular: nearly ** Belgians connected one or more payment cards to Apple Pay in December 2018, whereas Google Pay had around * users. Contactless payments in general, however, accounted for only about four percent of total payments in Belgium in 2018. PayPal ranked among the most used payment methods for online shopping in the country, although it was still behind Bancontact.