The official number of Apple Pay mobile payment users in Poland is a mystery. Neither Apple - the service operator, the banks, or payment company representatives want to divulge any statistics about Apple Pay customers in Poland. In fact, they don’t want to say much about this subject at all. But there are two exceptions. The first one is Pekao. The bank surprised us two days ago when it said that in the first week after the iPhone payment service became available it was activated by 21 thousand customers, and that number has probably grown closer to 25 thousand.

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The second exception is mBank. The bank's spokesperson Krzysztof Olszewski didn't say exactly how many mBank customers use Apple Pay, citing a confidentiality agreement with Apple. - What I can say is that after the first week of making Apple Pay available to our customers, it has been used by 40 percent of customers who use iOS devices - he said.

An unofficial source told me that mBank customers using cards issued by just one of the card companies added over 50 thousand cards to Apple's digital wallet. mBank issues both Mastercard and Visa cards, and the proportion between the two is approximately 50-50 percent. This could mean that as much as 100-120 thousand mBank customers use iPhone mobile payments.

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Another unofficial source told me that the number of Apple Pay users at BZ WBK is between 30 and 40 thousand. This means that just the three banks mentioned above should have between 155 and 185 thousand users of the new service. The total number will also have to include Apple Pay users among the customers of Alior, BGŻ BNP Paribas, Getin, Nest, Raiffeisen Polbank and T-Mobile Usługi Bankowe. Unfortunately, I don't have any information regarding these banks. I would estimate that the number of users there should be at least around 20 thousand, but i admit this is a very rough estimate.

This would mean that just a week and a half after Apple Pay was introduced in Poland, the number of users could be between 175 and over 200 thousand. It's a very good number - I don't think anyone expected it to be that good. Let me remind you that Apple Pay's main competitor, Google Pay - which works on Android smartphones - had approximately 300 thousand users at the end of the first quarter of this year, which is almost a year and a half after the service was introduced. I assume, however, that Apple Pay's popularity growth dynamic will be much slower in the coming weeks due to the limited number of iPhone devices on the Polish market.