With 25.5 billion real-time digital payment transactions in the year 2020, India has emerged as the number one country for digitized real-time payment. China has emerged second with 15.7 billion transactions, followed by South Korea with 6 billion transactions and Thailand with 5.2 billion at the fourth position.

The report was published by ACI Worldwide and GlobalData which did a detailed analysis of real-time payment volumes, growth, and dynamics across 48 global markets.

The firm found that paper-based payments had a considerable share of 61.4 percent. Out of the remaining 40%, instant payments and other electronic payments( Non-Instant ones ) stood 15.6 percent and 22.9 percent respectively.

This is poised to change by 2025 where the share of volume by instant payments and other electronic payments is expected to rise to 37.1 percent and 34.6 percent respectively, leaving the volume of paper-based transactions at 28.3 percent.

The firm states that the pandemic has been a driving cause for the same.

The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital payments with many first-time users adopting digital payments and significant uplift by merchants. As the industry evolves, we expect to see increased adoption across different users and volume growth is driven by mass adoption, recurring payments, transit payments as well as cross-border transactions,” said Kaushik Roy, Vice President and head of product management, Asia, Middle East, and Africa, ACI Worldwide.