The share of the volume of cashless transactions with payment cards issued by Ukrainian banks reached 45.1% in 2018[1], up 5.8 pp from 2017 (39.3%), according to the 2018 Review of the Payment Card Market and Payment Infrastructure of Ukraine published by the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU).
These positive developments are associated with the stable growth of demand for cashless operations in Ukraine and with the spread of innovative financial services.
The number of cashless transactions in 2018 increased almost 33.0% from 2017, to 3.1 billion, totaling UAH 1,297 billion in volume, up 55.4% (compared to 2017).
Retail payments via POS accounted for 51.2% of the number of cashless payment card transactions in 2018.
By volume of cashless transactions, card-to-card (P2P) transfers increased substantially. These transactions generated UAH 465 billion in 2018, a twofold increase from UAH 220 billion in 2017 (with their share rising 9.5 pp to 35.8% of the total amount of cashless transactions). At the same time, the share of retail payments via POS fell 2.6 pp (to 29.3% from 31.9%).
At this time, the NBU is examining these developments in the structure of cashless transactions and their potential impact on payment market conditions and continues to expand the set of statistical reporting indicators that characterize the use of payment cards.
Along with that, the payment infrastructure continued to expand in 2018 to accommodate cashless transactions. The network of retail POS-terminals increased 20.2% in 2018, to 278,993[2].
In addition, contactless retail POS-terminals increased in number throughout last year, driven, among other things, by the spread of innovative services such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, which started operating in Ukraine. Today, nearly 79.4% of retail POS-terminals in Ukraine have the contactless payment capability (up from 70.2% as of 1 January 2018).
On top of that, smartphone- and gadget-based contactless payment services supporting the NFC technology are increasingly gaining in popularity in Ukraine. Tokenization services enable the use of payment card details (including the details of magnetic-stripe-only cards) in contactless payments using this technology. Simultaneously, one out of nine actively used payment cards in Ukraine is contactless, with the number of contactless cards at four million (up 44.3% from early 2018).
For reference: As of 1 January 2019, Ukraine had 73 banks in operation that were participants of card payment systems.
[1] The Cashless Economy project sets a target of 55% for cashless transactions through the end of 2020.
[2] the number of POS terminals is part of the data that Ukrposhta JSC provided to the NBU within the framework of a pilot project for filing reporting statements (starting from Q1 2019, such data will be required for filing under the Statistical Reporting Rules approved by NBU Board Resolution No. 120 dated 13 November 2018).