Digital payments are no longer a side channel for credit union card programs. In Velera's May 2026 Payments Index, digital activity accounted for nearly half of card transactions and a majority of purchase volume across the company's same-store credit union card population.
Through April 2026, Velera reported that digital transactions represented 48% of all credit card transactions and 46% of all debit card transactions. The purchase side has already crossed the line: digital credit purchases represented 57% of all credit purchases, while digital debit purchases represented 56% of all debit purchases.
The operational takeaway for credit unions is straightforward. A card program is increasingly won or lost before a member pulls out a physical card. Card-on-file, e-commerce, tokenized credentials, mobile wallets, instant digital card access, alerts and controls are now part of the core card experience, not enhancement layers around it.
The dataset is large enough to matter
The Payments Index is not a survey of intentions. Velera said the May report reflects a same-store population of credit unions that processed with the company from the start of 2024 through April 2026. Over the rolling 12-month period from May 2025 through April 2026, the index represented 3.7 billion transactions valued at $189 billion of credit and debit card activity.
Velera defines digital payments broadly: card-not-present activity plus tokenized transactions, including digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. That definition matters because it captures the combined shift away from card-in-hand usage, not just one wallet provider or one checkout flow.
Even with higher fuel and inflation pressure in April, card activity remained resilient. Debit purchases rose 8.5% year over year, while credit purchases rose 3.1%. Debit transactions were up 5.0%, and credit transactions rose 2.6%.
Wallets are still small, but moving fast
Digital wallets remain a smaller share than the broader digital-payments category, but the growth is visible. Year to date through April, digital wallets accounted for 12% of all debit transactions, up from 9% a year earlier. For credit cards, wallets accounted for 7% of transactions, up from 6%.
For now, the digital-wallet story is also an Apple Pay story. Velera said Apple Pay represented 92.9% of debit digital-wallet transactions and 89.0% of credit digital-wallet transactions in its year-to-date data. Google Pay was second, at 5.8% of debit wallet transactions and 9.1% of credit wallet transactions. Samsung Pay was third.
That does not mean credit unions can ignore the rest of the wallet ecosystem. It means the immediate member-experience question is whether Apple Pay provisioning is clean, fast and visible enough that the credit union's card becomes the default credential when a member sets up or replaces a phone.
Contactless is changing the physical card too
The physical card is not disappearing. It is changing. Contactless credit transactions represented 29% of all credit transactions year to date through April, up from 25% in 2025. Contactless debit transactions represented 26% of all debit transactions, up from 20%.
At the same time, EMV chip transaction share moved lower in Velera's data. Credit EMV chip transactions accounted for 21% of all credit transactions, down from 27% in 2025. Debit EMV chip transactions accounted for 25% of all debit transactions, down from 30%.
That creates a practical roadmap for card teams. The next round of card competition is less about whether a credit union offers a card at all and more about whether that card is easy to provision, easy to manage, visible inside digital banking, ready for wallet use, and supported by fraud and dispute workflows that match the way members are actually paying.
Velera's own recommended actions point in the same direction: make digital banking the card-management hub, push wallet provisioning at activation, enable instant origination and digital-card access, and close gaps in the mobile experience. Those are vendor recommendations, but the data behind them is hard to dismiss. In Velera's card base, most purchase dollars are already moving through digital channels.
The strategic risk for credit unions is not that members abandon credit union cards overnight. It is quieter than that. The risk is that the credit union card remains technically open, physically issued and operationally sound, while the member's default credential in the places they actually spend becomes something else.