Retail payment providers must decide whether to invest in consumer activation, merchant acceptance, or both. This study compares those signals using published country tables from the European Central Bank’s 2024 Study on the Payment Attitudes of Consumers in the Euro Area. Across 20 countries, the share of point-of-sale transactions paid without cash correlates with the share of respondents preferring noncash methods (r = 0.65) and with the share of transactions where noncash payment was available (r = 0.70). Leave-one-country-out prediction error falls from 11.67 percentage points for a country-mean benchmark to 9.54 with preference alone, 8.91 with acceptance alone, and 8.89 with both. Adding account ownership yields 8.58, a modest further gain. Latvia, Portugal, and Slovakia combine above-median noncash preference with above-median reports of cashless payment refusal. Germany illustrates the limits of a simple market screen: its observed noncash use exceeds the model’s held-out estimate by 26.03 points. The results support using demand and acceptance as complementary market diagnostics, followed by local transaction research before investment. The analysis describes associations among national aggregates and does not identify a causal effect of merchant acceptance.