Filenews 23 July 2022 - by Theano Thiopoulou
The use of cards in Cyprus is gaining ground and cash for transactions is being side-lined. Seven out of ten payments in Cyprus are made with cards and, according to data announced by the European Central Bank, 69.5% of payments in 2021 were made with plastic money. For 2020 there is no data available while in 2019 the use of cards in payments was 64.1%. Credit transfers make up 18.3% of payments and electronic payments 3.5%.
In the rest of the countries, the use of cards for 2021 was: Belgium 52%, Estonia 63.9%, Ireland 62.4%, Greece 69.5%, Spain 66.4%, France 59.3%, Italy 52.5%, Latvia 62.8%, Lithuania 68.4%, Malta 54.4%, Austria 51.5%, Portugal 72.2%, Slovenia 51.6%, Slovakia 56.5%, Finland 61.6%. Portugal has the highest rate of card payments. The highest share of credit transfers is in Finland, with around 38%, and Germany accounts for the highest rate of direct debits, with around 43%, again expressed as a percentage of the total number of cashless payments in 2021.
Card payments in the Eurozone accounted for 49% of all transactions, while credit transfers accounted for 22% and direct debits for 20%. The number of direct debits within the euro area increased in 2021 by 5.8% to 23.2 billion, the corresponding total value increased by 11.1% to €7.3 trillion.
The number of cards and ATMs
The number of card transactions increased in 2021 by 17.3%, to 56.3 billion, with the corresponding total value increasing by 14.4%, to €2.3 trillion. This corresponds to an average value of around €40 per card transaction. The number of cards in the euro area related to payments increased in 2021 by 4.6% to 637.7 million. With a total population of the euro area of 343 million, this accounted for about 1.9 payment cards per capita. In 2021, the total number of ATMs in the euro area fell 4.2% to 0.28 million.
