The share of cashless payments in Ukraine in January-June increased by 5.7% YoY, to 55.1%, and the total number of cashless transactions rose by 4.1%, to 86.1% (3.36 billion), according to the website of the National Bank Ukraine (NBU).
According to the NBU, the total number of transactions (non-cash and cash withdrawals) using payment cards issued by Ukrainian banks in H1 increased by 16.6%, to 2.743 billion, and their amount – by 7%, to UAH 1.784 trillion.
At the same time, in H1, the number of cash withdrawal operations decreased by 12% and the amount – by 5%, according to the NBU data.
“In January-June, as before, the largest number of transactions using cards were payments in retail chains – 49.5%, while transfers from card to card dominated in terms of amount – 42.3% (the average check of one such operation was UAH 1,420),” the press service said.
According to the report, as of July 1, the number of payment cards in Ukraine amounted to 71.7 million, up by 4.9%.
During June, 36.4 million payment cards (50.7% of all payment cards) were used for debit transactions (non-cash and cash withdrawals), a third of them (33.9%) were contactless and tokenized cards.
The number of contactless cards used in June increased by 25.6%, to 9.6 million compared to January, and tokenized ones – by 22.5%, to 2.7 million.
According to the central bank, over the year the network of contactless merchant ATMs expanded by 33.5%, to 292,000, and the number of POS-terminals – by 11.2%, to 340,600.
The ability to make contactless payments is provided by 84.3% of POS-terminals, while last year this figure was 86%, the NBU said.
As of July 1, the ratio of the total number of ATMs (contact and contactless) and the resident population was 8,500 per 1 million people, while last year this figure was 8,000 per 1 million people.
According to the NBU, the regional distribution of the ATM network, as before, remains uneven: Kyiv city, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkov regions are in the lead in the number of payment cards and payment devices. At the same time, the smallest number of payment devices is observed in the west of the country, in Luhansk and Donetsk regions.
As of July 1, 70 participants of card payment systems were working in Ukraine. (Open4Business/Business World Magazine)