East Asia & Pacific · GDP rank #24
Hong Kong
HK · HKD @ 0.1276/USD
Tab 02
Consumer payments
How consumers actually pay: the share of cash, the stock and flow of cards, the scheme split at checkout, which mobile wallets matter, and how broadly POS acceptance reaches.
Every figure is authored against a named publisher — click the ⓘ anywhere to open the source panel with the underlying URL and access date.
Cash share of POS volume
Cash share of POS value
Debit-card penetration
Credit-card penetration
Payment mix
Cash vs. non-cash
The authored corpus for this country carries a single cash figure; the remainder is reported as a pooled non-cash bucket. See the card and wallet sections for the break-down within that bucket.
Share of POS
- Cash18%
- Non-cash (cards + wallets + A2A)82%
Cash behaviour
- Trend
- declining
- Context
- Cash has fallen steadily as FPS and AlipayHK/WeChat Pay HK subsume transit and small-ticket retail; Octopus remains dominant for transit.
Source · Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA)
Scheme share
Which networks clear the card volume
Scheme share is the split of general-purpose card purchase volume — not issuance, not count of cards. A high domestic share (e.g. UnionPay, RuPay, ELO) means a large share of card flow never touches a global scheme.
UnionPay share reflects strong GBA and Mainland-linked retail corridor.
Share of card volume
- Visa46%
- Mastercard38%
- Union Pay10%
- Amex5%
- Jcb1%
Debit transactions · 2024
Active debit cards
Credit transactions · 2024
Active credit cards
Mobile wallets
Where wallets actually land
User counts are the best single scalar for wallet reach, but they understate usage intensity in markets where one super-app carries multi-digit trillions of renminbi or rupees. For flow, see the rails tab.
Active users
- Octopus34.8M
closed-loop + stored value
- AlipayHK3.8M
super-app wallet
- WeChat Pay HK3.2M
super-app wallet
- PayMe (HSBC)3.1M
P2P + P2M wallet
Notable wallets
Octopus
closed-loop + stored value
Operator · Octopus Cards Limited
34.8m cards in circulation vs 7.5m population — transit plus point-of-sale plus online; Apple Pay and Samsung Pay Octopus integration since 2020.
Octopus Cards Limited
AlipayHK
super-app wallet
Operator · Ant Financial (HK)
AlipayHK
WeChat Pay HK
super-app wallet
Operator · Tencent
WeChat Pay HK
PayMe (HSBC)
P2P + P2M wallet
Operator · HSBC Hong Kong
HSBC Hong Kong
Acceptance
- POS terminals
- 180.0k
- POS per million people
- 24.0k
- QR acceptance
- HKQR common standard by HKMA; AlipayHK, WeChat Pay HK, FPS QR all use common schema
Source · HKMA