BAKU, Azerbaijan, Mar. 2
By Nargiz Sadikhova – Trend:
Some 3.2 billion operations worth 52 trillion tenge ($124.6 billion) were carried out in Kazakhstan using plastic cards in 2020, which is 1.7 times more than in 2019, Trend reports citing National Bank of Kazakhstan.
The bank’s statistics show that nine out of ten transactions carried out using plastic cards were cashless. Some 2.9 billion non-cash transactions worth 35.3 trillion tenge ($84.6 billion) were carried out using payment cards of Kazakh issuers, which is 2.4 and 2.5 times more, respectively.
The bank said that the COVID-19 pandemic has made its own adjustments and led to an increase in non-cash transactions and online shopping. This is confirmed by the decrease in the number of cash withdrawal operations, the number of which decreased by 21 percent in 2020 compared to 2019 and amounted to 297 million operations.
The infrastructure for paying for goods and services using payment cards is also expanding, the bank said. The number of entrepreneurs accepting payment cards is increased and exceeded 108,000. In total, 203,000 POS terminals operate in Kazakhstan.
The number of facilities accepting cashless payments increased by 26 percent and the number of POS terminals also went up by 26 percent in 2020 as compared to 2019. By the end of 2020, 86 percent of POS terminals on the market supported contactless payment function.
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