COVID-19 Fuels 41 Percent Spike In Global Real-Time Payments

COVID-19 has dramatically increased reliance on real-time and digital payments, leading to a 41 percent surge in real-time payment transactions from 2019 to 2020. That’s according to a new report from ACI Worldwide and GlobalData, which found that more than 70.3 billion real-time payments were processed last year. The report is the second installment of the “Prime-Time for Real-Time study,” which examines global real-time, account-to-account payments in 48 markets around the world.

The top 10 countries by number of real-time transactions were India (25.5 billion), China (15.7 billion), South Korea (6 billion), Thailand (5.2 billion), the U.K. (2.8 billion), Nigeria (1.9 billion), Japan (1.7 billion), Brazil (1.3 billion, marking a 58 percent increase from last year), the U.S. (1.2 billion) and Mexico (942 million).