South Korea’s mobile payments market expanded 53 per cent sequentially in Q2 as more Koreans used their smartphones to make purchases, according to the Bank of Korea.

Mobile payments in the quarter nearly doubled from Q1 to an average of KRW20.7 billion ($18 million) per day, Yonhap news agency reported.

The central bank said the average number of mobile payments made per day increased 83 per cent quarter-on-quarter to 810,000.

The country, with 28.17 million cards preregistered on users’ smartphones in Q2, has 11 mobile payment services, including KakaoPay (owned by Daum Kakao which operates one of South Korea’s most popular messaging apps, KakaoTalk), Naver Pay (run by the country’s top internet portal operator Naver) and Samsung Pay.