Yahoo Finance This map shows how much you can spend on contactless cards around the world
Shoppers in China and Japan can spend double what their European counterparts can on contactless cards, new research shows.
Expert Market, a comparison site for card payment systems, collated data from national banks, card providers, and financial news outlets to map contactless card limits around the world. The research found that the highest limits are in Asia, where parts of China and Japan have limits above £100 ($125).
Poland and Brazil have the lowest limits, at around £10. Britain has a limit of £30, which ranks 13th out of the 49 countries Expert Market looked at.
Contactless payments are where people simply tap their cards on readers to pay rather than use chip and pin, sign for card payments, or use cash. Limits are in place to stop stolen cards being used to make large purchases before people can freeze their cards.
Contactless payments were first introduced in Britain in 2007 and last year overtook chip and pin payments as the most popular form of card payments in the UK.
Expert Market’s Lucy Crossfield said: “Countries that are slow to adapt to new payment technologies risk being left behind in what is an increasingly cash averse market. Sweden is well on the way to becoming the first cashless society in the world and contactless cards are becoming the payment of choice in most urban centres too.”
Just 1% of transactions in Sweden involve cash or coins and a senior central banker in the country predicted last month that Sweden would be totally cashless within five years.
Crossfield said: “Cash is quickly becoming an outdated and inconvenient way to pay. Going contactless is a great way for small businesses to future-proof, especially trendy pop ups that want to attract tap-happy millennials.”
