I don’t know if it’s that surprising. It’s easy to migrate over small markets and the population of Australia is extremely geographically concentrated.

Australia wasn’t the first, but it did have the second highest adoption rate of contactless payments in the world at one point, behind New Zealand.

In Australia, it helped that there were only about five POS acquirers of note (the big four banks plus Tyro), who owned pretty much all the terminal hardware.