Co-Branded Credit Cards in the U.S., 8th Edition

In terms of dollar purchasing trends, overall purchasing volume for the largest ten co-branded programs is down 5% due to the pandemic and its devastation of the travel and leisure industries. Therefore, the current list of the ten largest co-branded card programs is therefore quite different from pre-COVID rankings.
In many ways, nonetheless, longer-term trends in the consumer payment industry remain in place notwithstanding the pandemic, albeit with COVID-19 curves and warp-speed accelerations. The longest-term trend in payments is the change in payment instrument use from checks and cash to cards.
About six in ten consumer payments are now made with debit, credit, or prepaid cards. Debit cards are used the most, followed by credit cards then by cash. More than half of consumers do not use paper checks at all, and 2019 was the first year that consumers used credit cards for more payments than cash.
Younger adult consumers have been especially disinterested in cash; a third of those under age 50 say they never use cash when paying in-store. Digital channels have given rise to their own forms of payments, with almost two-thirds of consumers having adopted at least one online payment method, such as PayPal, Venmo, or Zelle.
29% of adults (or 73.7 million) have co-branded credit cards in their name, somewhat below the 32% of adults with store-only credit cards. In keeping with the all-purpose nature of co-branded cards, a somewhat higher percentage of adults use co-branded cards monthly than use store-only cards monthly.
By type of co-branded credit card, 17% of adults have department store co-branded cards, compared with 5% with warehouse club co-branded cards, 5% with Amazon/Prime co-branded cards, and over 2% with airline/hotel branded cards. Frequency of use patterns, however, reset the hierarchy.