An incentive not to take out your wallet anymore: in 2025, 88% of payments at POS in Italy were made contactless, and 24% of transactions were made via smartphone or smartwatch. Physically inserting the card into the terminal, a gesture that was the norm until a few years ago, has become residual. Yet, according to the latest Space survey by the European Central Bank, referring to 2024, cash remains the most used instrument in Italian stores: 61% of payments at the point of sale, by number of transactions, still occur in banknotes and coins.
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More than 16 billion transactions
This emerges from the new report by the Bank of Italy, published yesterday. Payment technology has become faster and more invisible, but it has not replaced cash: it has complemented it. Between 2018 and 2025, transactions with alternatives to cash more than doubled, exceeding 16 billion transactions. The process intensified during the pandemic years and consolidated in the following years, signaling a structural change in payment habits.
Card boom
The growth is mainly driven by cards, which in 2025 accounted for 75% of non-cash transactions, up from 63% in 2018. Between 2022 and 2025, card payments at POS increased from about 6 to over 10 billion transactions, with an average annual growth rate of 15.7%. Growth is not uniform among products: debit cards show a +17.1% average annual increase and prepaid cards +15.1%, compared to +9.1% for credit cards. In 2025, debit covers 71.2% of POS transactions, prepaid 17.4%, credit 11.6%.
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Cash does not give up
Cash, for its part, does not disappear: it shrinks. Withdrawals fell from about 1.4 billion transactions in 2018 to just over 1.2 billion in 2025, with the contraction concentrated in 2020, the pandemic year, and a subsequent stabilization at lower but not decreasing levels. ATMs remain the dominant channel, with 88% of total withdrawals in 2025; cash withdrawals at the point of sale, although increasing, cover just 0.3% of the total.
Territorial gaps
The territorial picture confirms still wide but decreasing gaps: between 2020 and 2025, per capita transactions with alternatives to cash grew by 88% in the Center and 121% in the South, where the starting level was lower. In 2025, per capita card transactions at POS remain at 194 in Lazio versus 124 in the South. On the cash access front, the network has shrunk but remains widespread: bank branches fell from 34,000 in 2008 to just over 19,000 in 2025 (-40%), while 98% of the Italian population lives within 5 kilometers of a cash access point, with an average distance of 1.2 kilometers.
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