People aged 18 to 25 spend three hours a day on their phones, searching, sending, swiping, reading, booking services, splitting bills and accruing stuff they plan to pay for later. You’d be hard pressed to find an 18-year-old who can remember a time when smartphones didn’t exist.

It’s easy to see how, in the not too distant future, digital wallets will replace leather ones in this generation’s pockets. Certainly across Europe and North America, Juniper Research predicts consumer spend via digital wallets will increase 40 per cent this year to almost $790 billion. In the US, Apple is about to launch its own credit card – a partnership with Goldman Sachs. Across Asia, Chinese online payment platform Alipay has 1 billion users.