A mobile wallet can hold several ways to pay. For most users, it holds just one. That leaves card issuers competing for a place in the wallet before the customer ever reaches a store’s payment terminal.
The October 2026 PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Apple Pay @12: Mobile Wallets Gain Ground, but Most Shoppers Still Tap a Card,” examines how consumers use wallets and choose among saved payment methods.
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It draws on a survey of 2,458 U.S. consumers. Its findings on saved payment methods cover mobile and digital wallet users broadly, including users of peer-to-peer apps such as Venmo and Cash App, rather than Apple Pay users alone.
Among wallet users, 54% keep only one payment method in the wallet they use most. Another 5% have multiple methods saved but always use the default, the option presented first. Only about 4 in 10 switch between saved methods. For an issuer, that means a customer’s decision to add a card has consequences beyond a single purchase: Without another saved option, there is no competing card to select inside that wallet.
Variations by Generation
The pattern varies by age. Among baby boomers and seniors who use wallets, 65% have only one payment method saved, compared with 49% of Generation Z users, a difference of 16 percentage points. Still, even among the younger group, nearly half have a single saved method. The findings describe the wallet consumers use most, rather than every wallet or payment account they hold.
For users who do switch, checkout is only one point of influence. Forty percent choose their saved payment method before checkout, while 27% choose at checkout. Another 21% decide before and at checkout equally, and 12% do not plan the choice. These findings cover 820 users with multiple saved methods who do more than simply use the default. An offer shown only on the payment screen therefore reaches many customers after they have already chosen how to pay.
Rewards still attract interest: 70% of wallet users say they are likely to use the card that earns the most rewards. But that stated preference sits alongside the prevalence of single-method wallets. For banks seeking more wallet transactions, the report points to an earlier task: getting customers to save another card so they have a choice to make.
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