Project XBY

Europe & Central Asia · GDP rank #22

Sweden

SE · SEK @ 0.1069/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

8%

Cash share of POS value

4%

Debit-card penetration

100% of adults

Credit-card penetration

52% of adults

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.

8%Cash

Share of POS

  • Cash8%
  • Non-cash (cards + wallets + A2A)92%

Cash behaviour

Trend
declining
Context
Sweden has the lowest cash-use of any developed economy; the Riksbank's 2024 report flagged cash resilience as a civil-contingencies concern, not a payments concern.

Source · Riksbank

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.

Maestro fully retired end-2023. V Pay migrated to Visa Debit.

Share of card volume

  • Visa56%
  • Mastercard38%
  • Amex5%
  • Other1%

Debit transactions · 2024

3.1B

Active debit cards

9.2M

Credit transactions · 2024

720.0M

Active credit cards

4.8M

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

  • Swish8.8M

    A2A P2P + P2M

  • Apple Pay2.9M

    device wallet

  • Klarna6.4M

    BNPL + checkout wallet

Notable wallets

Swish

A2A P2P + P2M

Operator · Getswish AB (owned by Danske Bank, Handelsbanken, Länsförsäkringar Bank, Nordea, SEB, Skandia, Swedbank)

Used by ~86% of Swedish adults as of January 2025; Swish for merchants live 2017; Swish Business ~340k merchants.

Swish / Getswish AB

Apple Pay

device wallet

Operator · Apple

Riksbank

Klarna

BNPL + checkout wallet

Operator · Klarna Bank AB

Klarna

Acceptance

POS terminals
218.0k
POS per million people
20.6k
QR acceptance
Swish QR dominant domestically; EMV QR rare

Source · Riksbank