Pay without cash
Girocard on record course – contactless is booming
Whether rolls or bus ticket: More and more people are paying even small amounts contactless with the Girocard. Why paying is now everyday life.
“With a card, please”: Paying without cash is increasingly popular with loading boxes in Germany. The Girocard is most common. The record value of 4.04 billion payment processes with the plastic card counted the Frankfurt facility Euro card systems in the first half of 2025 – an increase of 5.3 percent at the same period last year.
This means that the Girocard is on course to surpass the maximum value from the previous year even in the year as a whole. In 2024 Euro card systems had counted 7.9 billion payment processes with the Girocard.
Small amounts are also often paid for cash without cash
Whether in the bakery, at the kiosk or at the machine: Customers are increasingly using the card even for smaller amounts, which is often often called “EC card”. Therefore, the average amount that is paid with the Girocard has been falling for years. In 2024 the amount was below the 40-euro mark, in the first half of the year a new low was reached at 37.28 euros.
According to Euro card systems, the entire sales with the Girocard added up to 150.7 billion euros in the first six months. That was a little more than a year earlier (150.1 billion euros).
In the trend: contactless payment
Above all, the quick payment in passing by, which was advertised as particularly hygienically during Corona pandemic, is increasingly popular: almost nine out of ten payments with the Girocard are now being handled without contact – so they pass by. In the first half of the year, the proportion of contactless payments continued to increase to 87.5 percent. A year earlier it was 85.4 percent, at the end of December 2024 the value was 86.8 percent.
According to Euro card systems, quickly paying is technically possible to almost 1.26 million paid terminals in retail in this country.
Contactless paying works with girocards and credit cards that have a so-called NFC chip. In addition, with a smartphone or a smartwatch with services such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, contactless money can be transmitted. The data for processing the payment is then encrypted with the terminal at the checkout when customers hold the card or smartphone or smartwatch close to the device. In the case of small amounts, not even entering the secret number (PIN) is necessary.
dpa
Source: Stern
