The amounts withdrawn from ATMs rose by 11% compared with the previous twelve months. Cardholders still prefer to withdraw all the money on their cards as bankers have only been promoting payments by card to merchants more aggressively in the last few years. With almost 11,000 ATMs installed throughout the entire country, this means about RON9 million withdrawn from each machine in a year on the average, that is RON25,000 a day.
Cardholders took more than RON24 billion out of ATMs in the first quarter, an increase of 11% on the same time of 2011, while payments made at the POS-es installed at merchants were five times lower, central bank data shows.
The volume of payments by card in stores stood at RON4.9 billion in the first quarter, and one quarter of them were made to merchants abroad.
Bankers have been aggressively promoting cards as a payment instrument only in the last few years after expanding the card acceptance networks looking to boost revenue. Credit cards are now almost exclusively used for payments at merchants.
“People are more informed about how to use the credit cards and increasingly more aware of the advantages they have if paying by card when shopping because of the installment payment or bonuses deposited back on their cards,” says Catalin Cretu, general manager of Visa Europe for Romania.
The payments made by the two million credit cards issued by the local banks reached RON800 million in the first quarter, 17% up from the same time last year.
Bankers are now shifting focus to credit cards and promise fee cuts or shopping bonuses to drive sales up or to boost their business volume. The credit card is the only product not touched by the new retail lending rules, which restricted the consumer loan drastically by capping the maturity to five years.
The number of credit cards fell by about 37,000 in the first quarter to 2.1 million cards, despite the bankers’ efforts. Debit cards, too, witnessed a decline to 11 million in March compared with December. Payments by debit cards amounted to about RON4 billion in the first quarter.
A radical change compared with the previous quarters, however, is the decline in the number of ATMs and POS-es installed at merchants, by 65 to 10,940 and by about 2,500 to almost 25,000 at the end of last year.
(EUR1=RON4.4435)
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)