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Little money is still transferred by smartphone in Switzerland. But the number of users of paid applications is increasing.
Paying with the smartphone is becoming more and more popular. The Swiss payment app Twint benefits from this. Around three million people in Switzerland have installed them on their smartphones. That’s double what it was a year ago. However, this does not mean that the company dominates the Swiss payments business.
Duplicate downloads
Be it Apple, Samsung, Google or Swiss banks, they all want to be ahead when it comes to paying via smartphones. It attracts a billion dollar market. With their joint Twint project, the Swiss banks want to counter the international tech giants. For a long time, however, the project was ridiculed, hardly anyone believed in Twint.
The doubling of downloads to three million is therefore a remarkable success. “There are still some kids and some older people who don’t have the app,” says Ralf Beyeler of the Moneyland comparison service. “But you can actually say: a lot of people have installed the application.” However, they use Twint very little.
Banks boycotted tech giants
In September, money was only sent 6.6 million times through the app. Debit and credit cards are used to pay many times more. In general, very little money is still transferred via mobile phones in Switzerland. According to the Swiss payment monitor, only about six percent of transactions are made through smartphones.
It’s unclear how exactly Twint, Apple, or Google split this piece of cake. However, it is clear that the tech giants have started something of a recovery race in recent months. Because before that, Swiss banks would have boycotted these payment services. “As a customer of a large bank like UBS, Credit Suisse, a cantonal bank or Postfinance, I was not able to use Apple Pay or Google Pay for a long time,” says Beyeler. Only in recent months have banks activated credit cards for these payment services.
So the race for the mobile wallet just moves on to the next round. According to one study, Twint has at least gained popularity thanks to Corona.
