South Korea: payment methods in retail 2022 | Statista (2024)

Credit cards made up the majority of POS payments in South Korea, whilst the market share of wallets continued to grow since COVID-19. Although credit cards and debit cards combined made up over 70 percent of in-store payments in the Asian country, credit cards were far more dominant than debit cards. This is not surprising, as South Korea had on one of the highest credit card penetration rates in APAC in 2021. Mobile wallets are expected to grow in importance in POS as the users of super app Kakoa are forecast to grow by millions between 2020 and 2025. Kakao shares characteristics with China's WeChat in that it is part of an all-in-one app ecosystem that originally started out as an instant messaging service and can use QR codes for in-store payments.