Argentina Made 7 Billion Fast Payments. Five Years Ago, 327m

Compiled by HaiPay on 16 October 2026 from the statistics on payments and financial market infrastructures that the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures publishes through the Bank for International Settlements, downloaded as the bulk files WS_CPMI_CASHLESS and WS_CPMI_MACRO from data.bis.org. Fast payments are the annual number of cashless payments reported with the payment speed attribute for fast payments, for all instruments where available and otherwise for credit transfers; all cashless payments are the annual number of cashless payments of all types, including card and e-money payments, credit transfers, direct debits, cheques and other instruments. Payments per person divide the number of fast payments by population from the macro file. 18 economies report a fast payment series for 2024; the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and South Africa do not report one in this dataset, which does not mean they have no fast payment system. 16 economies have both a fast payment figure and an all-cashless figure for 2024; Hong Kong SAR and the Netherlands lack the latter. Coverage of the fast payment series differs: China reports only transactions processed in its Internet Banking Payment System, Korea includes its Electronic Banking System and CD/ATM system, Japan excludes credit transfers between accounts at the same bank, and Spain reports interbank SCT Inst payments only. In Argentina, fast payments numbered 326.7 million in 2019 and 7,019.4 million in 2024, a 21.5-fold rise, against 81.7 million in 2014. All cashless payments rose from 2,805.8 million to 12,367.6 million, or 4.41-fold, so fast payments accounted for 70.0 per cent of the increase. Fast payments were 5.9 per cent of Argentina’s cashless payments in 2014, 11.6 per cent in 2019, 26.9 per cent in 2020, 22.6 per cent in 2021, 32.9 per cent in 2022, 45.2 per cent in 2023 and 56.8 per cent in 2024, and were 73.3 per cent of credit transfers in 2019 and 97.1 per cent in 2024. Across the 16 economies in 2024 the share of fast payments in all cashless payments was 85.5 per cent in India, 56.8 in Argentina, 44.1 in Brazil, 37.9 in Mexico, 22.0 in Korea, 19.6 in Turkiye, 13.9 in Sweden, 10.1 in Japan and in Singapore, 7.9 in Australia, 5.7 in Belgium, 5.0 in Spain, 2.9 in China, 1.8 in France, 0.9 in Germany and 0.8 in Italy, with a median of 10.1 per cent; in Germany direct debits were 43.1 per cent of cashless payments. Fast payments per person in 2024 were 298.4 in Brazil, 189.1 in Korea, 149.1 in Argentina, 126.5 in India, 95.5 in Hong Kong SAR, 95.2 in Sweden and 82.8 in Singapore, and 4.0 in Germany, the lowest of the 17 economies with population data. Among the 18 economies with values for 2022 and 2024, the number of fast payments grew 3.40-fold in Argentina, the most, followed by France at 3.02 and Brazil at 2.64. The 18 economies made 294.8 billion fast payments in 2024, of which India and Brazil together made 82.0 per cent. Every share, ratio, multiple and median is HaiPay’s arithmetic on the published values. Three limits apply. The definition of a fast payment and the coverage of each national series differ, as described above, so cross-economy comparisons indicate scale rather than exact rank. The statistics do not break Argentina’s fast payments down by service, channel or user, so they cannot show whether the growth came from QR code payments, wallets, bank apps or businesses. And these are counts of payments, not values, which in Argentina’s case also avoids distortion from high inflation over the period but says nothing about the amounts moved. HaiPay did not contact the BIS or the Central Bank of Argentina.