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FinObservatory

Payments

Trace money from retail instruments to 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.

$1148T
Fedwire Funds, value transferred
Federal Reserve | 2025
37.3x
Fedwire value as a multiple of US GDP
WDI GDP | 2025
$463T
CHIPS, value settled
TCH via BIS CPMI | 2024
219.7B
US cashless payments, transactions
BIS CPMI | 2024
78%
US cashless volume on cards + e-money
BIS CPMI | 2024
860
Cashless payments per resident, Korea
BIS CPMI + WDI | 2024

Data as of 2024 annual data (BIS CPMI), 2025 annual + 2026-05 monthly (Fedwire)

Wholesale is not retail. A card tap and a $5.3 million average Fedwire transfer are both "payments", but they run on different rails with different risks. Retail rails (cards, credit transfers, direct debits, cheques) move enormous numbers of small payments; the policy questions are cost, access, and speed. Wholesale rails (RTGS systems like Fedwire, and netting systems like CHIPS) move a country's entire financial system across the central bank's balance sheet every few days; the policy questions are liquidity, intraday credit, and what happens if the rail stops. The BIS CPMI collection covers roughly 27 jurisdictions, not the world; coverage caveats live in the methodology. Figures are displayed with attribution to their publishers; this page republishes no bulk data.

Payments

Cards dominate in the US and UK, but not in Germany

Annual shares of cashless payment transactions by instrument across eight CPMI economies over each economy's reported period. 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%.
Cards + e-moneyCredit transfersDirect debitsCheques
United States
78%cards '24
United Kingdom
72%cards '24
Germany
36%cards '24
France
64%cards '24
India
6%cards '24
Brazil
34%cards '24
China
63%cards '24
Japan

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

Payments

India's cheque share collapsed as instant transfers took over

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.
United StatesFranceCanadaIndiaBrazilUnited Kingdom
Hover for each economy's cheque share of cashless volume

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.

#EconomyYearCashless payments (bn)Per residentCard + e-money share
1Korea202444.586067%
2Singapore20245.082087%
3Australia202420.977075%
4Sweden20247.268557%
5United Kingdom202447.168172%
6Brazil2024144.067934%
7United States2024219.764678%
8Belgium20246.655660%
9Netherlands20219.755549%
10Switzerland20244.651458%
11Canada202420.248984%
12France202432.547464%
13Germany202436.443636%
14China2024565.940263%
15Russia202055.738391%
16Spain202417.736268%
17Saudi Arabia202411.632989%
18Türkiye202423.727778%
19Argentina202412.427140%
20Italy202414.624773%
21Japan202420.8168-
22South Africa202410.316166%
23India2024208.21446%
24Mexico202416.512660%
25Indonesia202412.34399%

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

Payments

Fedwire's annual transfer value has multiplied 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.
Fedwire Funds
Hover for each year's value of transfers originated, USD trillions

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

Payments

Fedwire settles more annual value than CHIPS

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.
Fedwire FundsCHIPS
Hover for each system's annual value, USD trillions

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.