Grandparents who pay for their purchases in cash, parents who use their bank card and children who prefer their cell phone. For many payment professionals, this is the standard usage pattern in France, as in most developed countries.
It is not certain that it will remain so for long: banks, technology providers and payment service specialists are multiplying innovations, with the idea of tackling the ultra-dominant card model. Because France is a country of cards. According to the latest annual survey of the European Central Bank, in 2022, cards represented 53% of the overall value of transactions in Francecompared to 35% for cash and 3% for mobile applications.
This domination continues to benefit the French CB card network, with 15 billion transactions in 2022, for a total amount of 685 billion euros, according to the CB Observatory. “In France, 85% of card transactions come from CB », underlines its general director, Philippe Laulanie.
A position inherited from forty years of presence on the market, since it was in 1984 that the bank card really took off, with the launch of the smart card. Problem: if CB remains, by far, the leading player in France, its market share is crumbling, slowly but surely, since it was 93% around ten years ago and is falling by approximately 1 point per year.
This erosion is one of the multiple consequences of the opening to new players in the payments market, long dominated by CB and the two major international networks, Visa and MasterCard. A movement favored by the evolution of European regulations since 2009, when a European directive created the status of payment service provider.
“This new status has lowered the barrier to entry for this payment management activity, which was previously regulated as a bank and therefore required a much less accessible license”explains Guillaume Petipas, KPMG partner specializing in financial services.
The opening of the market has increased with the rise of “open banking”, which authorized approved service providers to access payment data and banking details in order to facilitate the development of innovative services, such as split payment. “Buy now, pay later” (“Buy now, pay later”).
The mobile phone, the new bank card
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