Puerto Rico’s consumers have made up their minds about how they want to pay. The island’s merchants, especially its smallest ones, haven’t caught up.
That’s the core tension in Mastercard’s latest State of Digitalization and Financial Inclusion study, released Tuesday, which found that 88% of consumers surveyed wish more businesses and individuals accepted digital payments, while 58% said they use cash at least once a month specifically because their preferred digital method wasn’t accepted.
Debit cards remain the most-used payment method at 63%, followed by bank transfers at 56% and digital wallets at 50%, a category where ATH Móvil, the homegrown mobile payment app operated by Evertec, is likely doing much of the heavy lifting.
“The data is encouraging: consumers in Puerto Rico are active across traditional and digital channels. It also shows that consistent everyday use depends on whether people understand a payment method and can use it where they need to,” said Pablo Cuarón, Mastercard’s country manager for Puerto Rico, during a media roundtable.
Pablo Cuarón, Mastercard’s Country Manager for Puerto Rico, during a roundtable discussion with local media at a hotel in San Juan.
“Our focus is on expanding digital acceptance, increasing payment options, and helping consumers understand the solutions available to them.”
Where the gap actually lives
During a press briefing on the study’s findings, company executives pinpointed where the acceptance gap is most pronounced: not in supermarkets or shopping centers, but among the island’s smallest businesses.
Citing internal data, the executives said only 15% of Puerto Rico’s microbusinesses have a card payment terminal, a stark contrast to the roughly 88% of consumers who say they want broader digital acceptance.
More than 90% of all businesses on the island fall into that microbusiness category, according to the figures cited, meaning the acceptance shortfall touches most of the island’s commercial units even if it represents a smaller share of total purchase volume.
Executives also addressed why: cost. Card acceptance fees and hardware costs remain a real barrier for small merchants, they said, even as cash itself carries a hidden cost of roughly 2% to 3% for a business once logistics, security risk, and cash-handling time are factored in, a point the company uses to push back on the perception that cash is “free” for merchants.
To close that gap, the company pointed to two specific tools rolling out locally: Tap on Phone, which lets merchants accept card payments using a compatible smartphone instead of buying dedicated hardware, and Click to Pay, a solution designed to simplify online checkout.
Familiarity breeds trust, its absence breeds hesitation
The study also found a direct line between how well consumers understand a payment method and how much they trust it. While 82% of respondents said they were familiar with debit cards, 78% with checking accounts and transfers, and 75% with savings accounts, familiarity dropped sharply for newer tools: 63% for digital wallets, 26% for Buy Now, Pay Later services, and just 16% for cryptocurrency wallets.
Trust and security topped the list of what consumers weigh when choosing how to pay: 96% called it a priority, and 93% said understanding how a payment method works mattered to them. Notably, 83% said they trust digital service providers with their money and data, and 82% said they feel safer carrying less cash.
Among the 6% of respondents who said they don’t currently use digital payments at all, 65% said they would likely adopt them in the future, suggesting the holdouts aren’t opposed to digital payments on principle, but are waiting on clearer information and broader acceptance.
Part of a bigger global shift
The Puerto Rico findings are part of a broader survey conducted across 10 Latin American and Caribbean markets between Feb. 11 and Feb. 26, 2026. According to company executives, Puerto Rico ranks among the top of that group in access to basic financial services such as checking accounts and debit cards, a sign of a more mature banking market than several regional peers. But the acceptance gap among small merchants, executives said, is proportionally larger here than in some of the other countries surveyed.
Caribbean Business research shows Puerto Rico’s tension between eager consumers and unprepared merchants mirrors a pattern playing out worldwide. Point-of-sale transactions globally were already 85% cashless by 2024 and are projected to reach 89% by 2030, according to industry tracking, while the Bank for International Settlements found that cash’s share of global payments fell 20 percentage points between 2017 and 2022 alone.
Sweden, the world’s most cashless society, now conducts an estimated 90% of transactions digitally. Closer to home, cash’s share of consumer payment volume across Latin America and the Caribbean fell from 57% in 2022 to 37% today, according to Payments and Commerce Market Intelligence, a decline roughly consistent with the shift captured in Puerto Rico.
The World Bank’s 2025 Global Findex report found a similar dynamic driving holdouts worldwide: most people who still pay exclusively in cash do so out of habit, a pattern that shifts only once digital payments become reliably accepted everywhere they shop, precisely the gap Puerto Rico’s own merchants have yet to close.
A different picture from the island’s own dominant wallet
The study’s framing centers on card-based and bank-linked digital payments, but that isn’t the only force shaping how Puerto Ricans actually pay day to day.
ATH Móvil, the peer-to-peer and merchant payment app operated by Evertec, says it has surpassed two million users on the island, according to the company’s own communications, a scale that suggests a homegrown digital wallet has already achieved wide adoption outside the card networks this study focuses on.
The Puerto Rico Department of the Treasury has also moved to incorporate ATH Móvil as an alternate official method for government payment collections, a sign that digital-payment infrastructure in Puerto Rico is expanding on more than one front simultaneously.
That context matters for how these findings should be read. The 50% of consumers already using digital wallets in the survey may be counting a market where a local platform, not international card networks, already dominates person-to-person and small-merchant digital transactions.
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