The real-time payment transactions in Malaysia surged by 864 per cent to more than 68 million in 2020 from seven million in 2019 as Covid-19 accelerated shift to digital payments, according to a new global report from ACI Worldwide and GlobalData.
As for value, the transactions in 2020 were worth US$5.55 billion (US1=RM4.122), up 908 per cent from 2019, the Prime-Time for Real-Time report revealed.
By 2025, the report projected that real-time payment transactions in Malaysia are set to increase to 1.45 billion while compound annual growth rate for real-time payments likely by 96.04 per cent.
As the pandemic continues to drive changes in consumer and business behaviours, ACI Worldwide chief product officer Jeremy Wilmot said banks, merchants and intermediaries across the payment ecosystem in Malaysia are responding rapidly, prioritising the shift to digital.
This is to protect current revenue streams and search for new ones through a fully digitised customer experience, he added.
“The pandemic has cast the spotlight on the importance of digital payments and robust payment Infrastructures, condensing a decade of anticipated innovation into one year, and creating human behavioural changes that will not reverse as we emerge from the crisis,” he said in a statement today.
He said the mobile wallet transaction volume in Malaysia rose 171 per cent last year and countries like Brazil, Mexico and Malaysia, where many people historically relied on cash, were now some of the fastest adopters of mobile wallets. — BERNAMA
