Contactless payments were adopted quickly in New Zealand. By 2018, 63% of New Zealanders were already making contactless payments at least once a week. Digital wallets put customers’ cards on their phones, which makes Tap to Pay even more convenient. In a 2024 survey, 15% of respondents said that digital wallets have become their primary payment method.

Many businesses have the same concerns: which digital wallets New Zealanders are using, how wallets affect terminal and gateway requirements, and what it takes to accept the common digital wallets at checkout.

Below, we’ll discuss how digital wallets work at the infrastructure level and what setup looks like for in-person and online businesses in New Zealand.

What’s in this article?

• What is a digital wallet?
  
• Which digital wallets are popular in New Zealand?
  
• How do digital wallets work for customers and businesses?
  
• What are the benefits of accepting digital wallet payments?
  
• What’s required for the setup and usage of digital wallets?
  
• Are digital wallets right for your New Zealand business?
  
• How Stripe Payments can help
  

What is a digital wallet?

A digital wallet (sometimes called an e-wallet) is an app that lets people store payment credentials (e.g., debit and credit cards, bank accounts, loyalty cards, transit passes) and use them to pay without exposing their card details. Instead of transmitting a real card number, the wallet stores a tokenized version and sends that token when a payment is made.

Which digital wallets are popular in New Zealand?

Digital wallet usage in New Zealand closely tracks smartphone market share and the pace at which local banks support the major platforms. There are three main options that customers are most likely to use:

• Apple Wallet: This supports Apple Pay, which is widely available through many major New Zealand banks, including ANZ, BNZ, Westpac, and Kiwibank. In New Zealand, iPhone adoption is relatively high. This makes Apple Pay an important volume driver.

• Google Wallet: Google Pay covers much of the Android side of the market and is broadly supported across NZ banks. Google Pay sees consistent use in the country.

• Samsung Wallet: Samsung Pay works on Galaxy devices. It has fewer users than Apple Pay or Google Pay, but it’s still relevant for businesses with customers who strongly prefer Samsung devices.

How do digital wallets work for customers and businesses?

From a customer’s perspective, paying with a digital wallet is simple. Add a card to the wallet app, secure the device with a personal identification number (PIN), Face ID, or fingerprint, then use it in-store or online.

Here’s what’s happening in the background:

• Token generation: The wallet generates a device-specific surrogate card number and a one-time cryptogram for that exact transaction.

• Payment transmission: That token, not the real card number, is sent to the business’s terminal or payment gateway.

• Network resolution: The acquiring bank sends the token forward to the card network, which maps it back to the underlying card using its token service.

• Authorization: The issuing bank approves or declines the transaction, and the response travels back through the same chain.

What are the benefits of accepting digital wallet payments?

Digital wallets can improve conversion. Ease of payment also boosts customer satisfaction as it removes steps from the moment a customer decides to pay.

Here are the benefits:

• Online checkout: A complicated checkout process is one of the most common reasons for cart abandonment. Digital wallets reduce the step of entering card details to a single authentication action.

• In-person retail: Here, the upside is meeting customer expectations. Customers generally assume they can tap their phones to pay. When they can’t, that creates unnecessary friction.

Beyond conversion, there are three practical advantages:

• Speed and throughput: In high-volume environments such as cafés and quick-service retail, wallet payments save time for people who are already holding their devices because there’s no need to search for a physical card.

• Fraud profile: Because wallets rely on tokenization and device-level authentication, they’re more difficult to exploit than physical cards. Lower fraud risk can minimize chargebacks and other fees.

• Consumer preference: Younger demographics in particular actively prefer digital wallet payments. Not supporting them is a choice that might alienate a large share of customers.

What’s required for the setup and usage of digital wallets?

The setup process depends on whether you’re taking payments in person, online, or both. If you already accept contactless payments or use a modern payment gateway, much of the work is already done.

In-person payments

If your terminal supports near-field communication (NFC), it should already accept digital wallet payments. Confirm with your terminal provider if you’re unsure. But for many businesses that operate modern hardware in New Zealand, there’s nothing else to configure.

• Terminal compatibility: Any modern, NFC-enabled terminal that accepts contactless cards will also accept digital wallets, usually without additional configuration.

• Reporting and settlement: Wallet payments appear in your reporting like any other contactless transaction, with the same settlement timing and reconciliation fields.

• Older hardware: If your terminal doesn’t support NFC, adding digital wallets requires a hardware upgrade. Whether that’s worth doing depends on your transaction volume and the types of customers you have.

Online and in-app payments

Online payments are where the integration work is required, but it’s typically easy. Stripe, for example, supports digital wallet transactions on businesses’ websites through Stripe Checkout or Stripe Elements, a set of prebuilt user interface (UI) components for building your web checkout flow.

The main steps for integrating digital wallet payments into your online shop or app include the following:

• Domain verification: You must register your domain for Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Samsung Pay. Your payment provider should have documentation that walks you through this process.

• Checkout integration: Prebuilt checkout components can integrate wallets with minimal coding. These solutions provide preconfigured UI components that handle payment logic, data validation, and security compliance.

• Testing: Use a test environment to run the full flow, including your order confirmation logic and webhook handling, before you go live so there are no surprises on launch day.

Are digital wallets right for your New Zealand business?

If a significant share of your customers use smartphones to shop or pay, you should support digital wallets at online checkout. The integration cost is usually relatively low compared to the conversion and experience gains, but there are a few cases where the decision needs more thought. If you need to replace terminals to support NFC, you should weigh that cost against how often customers already try to pay with their phones.

And regardless of whether you accept wallets, you must have solid checkout fundamentals. Wallets remove hurdles regarding card entry, but they won’t fix a slow site, confusing forms, or broken mobile flows.

If you use Stripe and haven’t integrated Apple Pay and Google Pay, it’s often a quick win worth prioritizing.

How Stripe Payments can help

Stripe Payments provides a unified, global payment solution that helps any business—from scaling startups to global enterprises—accept payments online, in person, and around the world.

Stripe Payments can help you:

• Optimize your checkout experience: Create a frictionless customer experience and save thousands of engineering hours with prebuilt payment UIs, access to 125+ payment methods, and Link, a wallet built by Stripe.

• Expand to new markets faster: Reach customers worldwide and reduce the complexity and cost of multicurrency management with cross-border payment options, available in 195 countries across 135+ currencies.

• Unify payments in person and online: Build a unified commerce experience across online and in-person channels to personalize interactions, reward loyalty, and grow revenue.

• Improve payment performance: Increase revenue with a range of customizable, easy-to-configure payment tools, including no-code fraud protection and advanced capabilities to improve authorization rates.

• Move faster with a flexible, reliable platform for growth: Build on a platform designed to scale with you, with 99.999% historical uptime and industry-leading reliability.

Learn more about how Stripe Payments can power your online and in-person payments, or get started today.