Annual number of contactless transactions in France 2014-2022, per capita

The number of contactless payments in France increased by more than 30 percent between 2020 and 2021, as the average person did more than 123 transactions. Contactless, sometimes referred to as NFC or mobile proximity payments, are payments performed with either debit cards or mobile devices such as phones or wearables through near field communication (NFC) technology. Google Pay and Apple Pay are the most well-known applications of this. Nevertheless, contactless payments are relatively undocumented. This is due to fintechs - the main organizations who offer this payment option - often do not share user figures, but also domestic payment infrastructure not being able to track such payments. Within Europe, France, the Netherlands, the UK, Poland, Turkey, Switzerland, and Russia are the only known countries who offer somewhat of an insight in this field. Notable for France is that contactless payments per capita were significantly higher than credit card payments per capita in the country.