The coronavirus pandemic has changed many things, including the way we shop and pay. We’ve collected three important facts from recent surveys.

Fact 1: Debit cards are indispensable as a payment method and are most frequently used for paying in shops

Debit cards are the most popular form of payment in Switzerland. According to a survey by the online comparison service The link will open in a new window moneyland.ch, 73% of respondents considered debit cards to be an important payment method, followed by credit cards with 71%. This means that coronavirus has dethroned cash, which is now in third place. Only 67% of people say they can’t do without cash – a year ago, this figure was 78%. As for paying in shops, 57% of respondents said they use their debit card frequently (several times a week, daily or for all their purchases). In the category of frequent use, debit cards therefore lead the pack, followed by cash and credit cards with 34% each.

Fact 2: Credit cards are the most popular for online purchases

According to the The link will open in a new window moneyland.ch survey, credit cards – used by 88% of respondents – remain the most popular method of online payment. 23% rarely pay by credit card, 51% occasionally and 14% often. This is followed by payment by invoice, with a total of 84%: 34% rarely pay by invoice, 45% occasionally and 5% often. After this come prepayments by bank transfer with a total of 51%, PayPal with 46%, TWINT with 43% and the PostFinance Card with 27%. 

Tip: we explain how you can pay your invoices quickly and easily via mobile banking or e-banking in the article “Find out how to pay QR-bills or create them yourself”.

Incidentally, according to the The link will open in a new window Swiss Payment Monitor (1/2021), the credit card is the payment method with the highest sales in Switzerland: people spend the most money with this method, namely 24% of their expenditure. This is followed by the invoice (22%), debit card (21%) and cash (13%). The share of sales for mobile devices (primarily smartphones) ranks fifth at 8%, followed by Internet payment methods such as PayPal (7.5%).

Fact 3: TWINT leads the field in mobile payments

According to the The link will open in a new window Swiss Payment Monitor (1/2021), mobile payments account for 8% of the share of sales, which means that they have more than doubled within a year. TWINT is by far the most widely used mobile payment solution in Switzerland: 74% of sales and 78% of transactions made using mobile devices are processed with TWINT. Apple Pay, meanwhile, accounts for 13% of sales and 9% of transactions made using mobile devices.

The most popular payment method available at PostFinance

Debit card: you can pay conveniently in shops and on the Internet using the PostFinance Card. The PostFinance Card is one of the most widely used debit cards in Switzerland: 2.8 million PostFinance Cards are currently in circulation. By the way, paying with the PostFinance Card is not only practical for customers, but also good for merchants: they benefit from attractive transaction costs at a fixed price. For up to 10,000 transactions per year, the costs amount to 23 centimes per transaction; for 10,001 transactions and more, it becomes even less expensive. And for small amounts of up to 5 francs, the flat fee is 0.05 francs; for amounts of between 5 and 10 francs, it is 0.1 francs per transaction.