Payments
Payment systems: retail rails and wholesale rails
How money actually moves. The retail layer is what households see: 26 countries report their cashless payment volumes to the BIS CPMI by instrument, and the mix (cards against credit transfers, the near-extinction of the cheque) is one of the cleanest structural series in finance. The wholesale layer is what banks see: the Fedwire Funds Service alone moved $1148 trillion in 2025, about 37 times US GDP, and CHIPS another $463 trillion. Same dollars, two different plumbing problems.
Data as of 2024 annual data (BIS CPMI), 2025 annual + 2026-05 monthly (Fedwire)
The cashless instrument mix, eight major economies
Share of each economy's cashless payment TRANSACTIONS by instrument (shares of volume, not value: volume shares need no exchange-rate step and are the comparison the CPMI's own comparative tables lead with). The structural stories are visible at a glance: the US and UK are card economies, Germany still runs on credit transfers and direct debits, and India's credit-transfer line is the UPI era arriving. In the US, cards and e-money carried 78.4% of cashless volume in 2024, while cheques fell from 17.1% of volume in 2012 to 4.1%.
Source: BIS, CPMI payments statistics (data.bis.org) Shares of the number of cashless payments; instrument totals are the canonical CPMI country-year cuts (credit transfers, direct debits, cheques, cards + e-money; residual instruments not drawn). Shared 0-100% scale across panels. Methodology
The decline of the cheque
The cheque's share of cashless volume, in the six charted economies that still reported one. India is the extreme case: 44.5% of cashless payments in 2012, 0.3% by 2024, a collapse driven by instant credit transfers rather than by cards. The US cheque share fell about 4.2-fold over the same window and remains the highest of the six.
Source: BIS, CPMI payments statistics (data.bis.org) Gaps are published gaps (the UK series enters in 2014), never interpolated. Methodology
Cashless payments per resident
Cashless transactions per resident per year, each of the 25 rankable CPMI reporters at its latest reported year. Korea leads at 860 payments per resident in 2024, roughly 2.4 per person per day. Population denominator: World Bank WDI SP.POP.TOTL (bulk vintage 2026-06-30, CC BY-4.0), same year as each country's numerator.
| # | Economy | Year | Cashless payments (bn) | Per resident | Card + e-money share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Korea | 2024 | 44.5 | 860 | 67% |
| 2 | Singapore | 2024 | 5.0 | 820 | 87% |
| 3 | Australia | 2024 | 20.9 | 770 | 75% |
| 4 | Sweden | 2024 | 7.2 | 685 | 57% |
| 5 | United Kingdom | 2024 | 47.1 | 681 | 72% |
| 6 | Brazil | 2024 | 144.0 | 679 | 34% |
| 7 | United States | 2024 | 219.7 | 646 | 78% |
| 8 | Belgium | 2024 | 6.6 | 556 | 60% |
| 9 | Netherlands | 2021 | 9.7 | 555 | 49% |
| 10 | Switzerland | 2024 | 4.6 | 514 | 58% |
| 11 | Canada | 2024 | 20.2 | 489 | 84% |
| 12 | France | 2024 | 32.5 | 474 | 64% |
| 13 | Germany | 2024 | 36.4 | 436 | 36% |
| 14 | China | 2024 | 565.9 | 402 | 63% |
| 15 | Russia | 2020 | 55.7 | 383 | 91% |
| 16 | Spain | 2024 | 17.7 | 362 | 68% |
| 17 | Saudi Arabia | 2024 | 11.6 | 329 | 89% |
| 18 | Türkiye | 2024 | 23.7 | 277 | 78% |
| 19 | Argentina | 2024 | 12.4 | 271 | 40% |
| 20 | Italy | 2024 | 14.6 | 247 | 73% |
| 21 | Japan | 2024 | 20.8 | 168 | - |
| 22 | South Africa | 2024 | 10.3 | 161 | 66% |
| 23 | India | 2024 | 208.2 | 144 | 6% |
| 24 | Mexico | 2024 | 16.5 | 126 | 60% |
| 25 | Indonesia | 2024 | 12.3 | 43 | 99% |
Source: BIS, CPMI payments statistics (data.bis.org) | World Bank WDI (SP.POP.TOTL) Most economies report through 2024; Russia last reported 2020 and the Netherlands 2021 (ranked at those years, stated in the Year column). Hong Kong SAR reports no all-speed instrument totals to this collection and is not rankable. Methodology
Fedwire Funds: the US wholesale rail since 1987
Annual value of transfers originated over the Fedwire Funds Service, the Federal Reserve's real-time gross settlement system, in USD trillions, from the Fed's own published table. From $152T in 1987 to $1148T in 2025, a 7.5-fold rise: about $4.6 trillion each business day, at an average of $5.28 million per transfer. Against US GDP of $30.8T in 2025 (World Bank WDI, current US$), Fedwire turns over the equivalent of national output roughly every 7 business days.
Source: Federal Reserve Banks, Fedwire Funds Service volume and value statistics Value of transfers originated per calendar year. The monthly table (2015-present) is carried in the same dataset. Methodology
Fedwire and CHIPS: RTGS vs netting
The two US large-value rails side by side on the CPMI window. Fedwire settles gross, payment by payment, in central bank money; CHIPS, The Clearing House's private-sector system, nets offsetting payments continuously and settled $463T in 2024 against Fedwire's $1133T, about 16 times that year's US GDP on its own. The CHIPS series here is the one The Clearing House reports to the BIS CPMI; TCH's public site publishes press summaries rather than a downloadable table.
Source: Federal Reserve Banks, Fedwire Funds Service volume and value statistics | The Clearing House (CHIPS), as reported to the BIS CPMI | BIS, CPMI payments statistics (data.bis.org) The CPMI's Fedwire values equal the Fed's own annual table in every overlapping year (asserted at build). CHIPS values as reported to the CPMI; cross-checked against TCH's published averages in the methodology. Methodology
Related: the repo and money-market plumbing these wholesale transfers settle against, on short-term funding; rates on financial conditions. See the full methodology for dataset codes, the canonical instrument-total cuts, anchors, and license notes.