Visa Europe has registered its highest ever revenues of EUR2.31bn for the year to June 2015, a surge of 25% year-on year, as more customers adopt contactless payment methods.

Contactless transactions totalled 1.7 billion in the year to September 2015, Visa Europe said in a statement. In the UK, 1 in 7 face-to-face Visa transactions were contactless as against 1 in 25 in the prior year.

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The company said that it currently accounts for over EUR1 in every EUR5.70 spent in Europe, with the total number of cards issued in Europe being 522 million. Point-of sale spending has soared by 7.7% to EUR1.58 trillion.

Visa Europe CEO Nicolas Huss commented: “Our new Annual Report shows that, financially, this was our most successful year ever – and by quite some distance.”

“Contactless transaction growth is off the chart – in 2015 we went through the billion contactless transaction-a-year barrier – and in a leading market like the UK it’s fast making cash seem peculiar. We’ve also launched a tokenisation service that devalues sensitive account data and brings more security to digital payments. Importantly it enables these transactions to flow across the existing industry infrastructure. In the first instance, it has supported the launch of Apple Pay in the UK, and is set to become the basis for many more payment products and solutions in the months and years ahead,” Huss added.

Visa Europe, owned by about 3,000 European banks, also stated that it has returned a record EUR739m to its member-shareholders in the form of rebates and joint-investment initiatives.

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The results come ahead of the company’s sale to its parent Visa in a EUR21.2bn deal, which will result in the creation of a single global company. The stock-cash deal, agreed to in November 2015, is expected to close between April and June 2016.