The growing number of contactless POS-terminals, the launch of banks mobile applications for payments by NFC-devices and the introduction of services like Gpay and Apple Pay have created favorable conditions for the NFC-payments development.

According to the results of Q3 2018, we can see an upward tendency for both contactless card transactions and NFC-payments (here and below there is the information, based on the cards data of UPC customer-banks' cards). There were more than 500,000 NFC-transactions during this period.

In early 2018, NFC-transactions covered only 0.2% of all contactless card payments and 0.05% of all purchases paid by card. At the end of the third quarter of 2018, these figures increased and NFC-transactions have already obtained 1.1% of all contactless card payments and 0.3% of all purchases paid by card. Today, more than 8,477 cards of UPC customer-banks' have been digitized in mobile wallets and used for NFC-payments. Ukrainians use their smart phones not only for communication, but also as a convenient tool for daily small purchases. The average amount of NFC-transactions in Q3 2018 was 176 UAH.

During the year, cardholders actively used their NFC-gadgets for payments at supermarkets, where almost 48% of purchases were made. The second popular place for NFC-transactions was restaurants – 19%.

The numbers of contactless payments in public transport (Tube) covered 15% and took the third place in this TOP-list.

It is interesting to note that for the last three quarters of 2018, more than 70 000 NFC-payments were made in public transport, which is almost 2% of all contactless payments.

The TOP five popular places for NFC-payments also included petrol stations - 5% and pharmacies - 2%