The total number of payment cards issued by Ukrainian banks has exceeded 115 million units, which averages out to about 3 cards per adult citizen of the country.
Anna Dovhalska, Deputy Chairperson of the Management Board at GLOBUS BANK, disclosed this information. Referring to the data from the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU), she noted that out of the total number of payment cards, over 45.3% are cards for expenditure transactions (over 52 million units), and their number increased by 12.5% compared to the previous year during 2023.
Furthermore, according to the expert, there has been a significant increase in the number of contactless cards: from December 2022 to December 2023, their quantity increased by 17% to 30.6 million units, thus almost 59% of active cards are contactless.
The popularity of tokenized payment cards (NFC technology) is also on the rise: from December 2022 to December 2023, their number increased by 57% to 12.4 million units (approximately one in every four active payment cards is tokenized).
"By the end of 2023, almost 90% of the total quantity and amount of cashless transactions in Ukrainian retail networks were carried out using contactless payment and NFC technology," emphasized the banker.
The expert noted that international payment systems MasterCard and Visa continue to lead in terms of transaction volumes. Throughout 2023, the share of transactions with cards from these systems accounted for 99.9% of the total number of transactions (7,912.5 million units) and 99.5% of the total transaction amount (UAH 6,140.8 billion).
Anna Dovhalska pointed out that in 2023, the highest number of transactions with payment cards was accounted for by transactions in retail networks, almost 70% (about 5 billion transactions). At the same time, card-to-card transfers lead in terms of transaction amounts - 37.1% (or UAH 1,478.6 billion).
"It can be assumed that the payment infrastructure and card issuance will continue to grow, so clients will continue to actively carry out card-to-card transfers (p2p transfers)," the banker predicts.
