Lee Min-hyung joined The Korea Times in 2014 and has worked as a journalist mainly in Korea’s finance, tech and automotive industry. He specializes in content creation, breaking news and in-depth analysis currently on transportation and mobility. You can reach him via mhlee@koreatimes.co.kr.
MZ Generation leads Apple Pay boom
A promotional image of Apple Pay is seen at a Hyundai Card building in Seoul in this file photo. Yonhap
By Lee Min-hyung
By Lee Min-hyung
Those born in the early 1980s and 2000s ― often dubbed the MZ Generation ― have driven the popularity of Apple Pay for the past month following its belated launch here, data from Hyundai Card showed.
Hyundai Card said it issued 355,000 new cards after the arrival of Apple Pay on March 21, up 156 percent from a year earlier. Hyundai Card is an exclusive card partner here for the mobile payment service of Apple.
More than 90 percent of Hyundai Card's new subscribers turned out to have registered their cards for the service on their Apple devices, according to the card firm.
By age group, the MZ Generation accounted for 79 percent of the card firm's new users. Of this, those in their 20s accounted for 51 percentage points, followed by 30-something subscribers whose portion reached 28 percentage points. Those in their 40s took up 12 percent.
More than 9.3 million Apple Pay transactions were made as of the end of April, the Hyundai Card data showed. About 71 percent of Hyundai Card users made Apple Pay transactions at least once during the same period.
Apple Pay was also used most frequently in convenience stores, big supermarkets and online food delivery platforms. Apple Pay users' overseas transaction volume accounted for 9 percent out of all the payments. The portion is typically around 2 percent for other cards here. In particular, Korean tourists frequently used Apple Pay abroad particularly when using transportation and home rent services, such as Uber and Airbnb.