Ukrainians tend to be more inclined to use cards for daily cashless payments. Cashless payments for goods and services became routine for millions of Ukrainian citizens. The NBU’s statistics on cashless settlements with payment cards issued by Ukrainian banks in Q1 2018 confirms this fact.
According to the results of Q1 2018, the share of cashless settlements increased to 44.4% of all operations and accounted for UAH 272.6 billion. This is a 5.1% increase over findings in 2017 (39.3%). For comparison, this indicator in 2012 was just 12.4%, in 2015 31.2%, in 2016 35.5% respectively.
Breakdown of card operations for the reporting period shows as follows:
- most expensive cashless operations were transacted online 40.5% (average check is UAH 403)
- retail stores accounted for the most operations 50.6% (average check is UAH 237).
The total number of payment cards in Ukraine as of 1 April 2018 accounts for 59.9 million cards, whereof almost 34.8 million cards are active (58%).
The number of contactless payment cards also continues to rise. In Q1 2018, the number of cards increased by 5% and amounted to 2.9 million.
The payment infrastructure shows an expansion trend. Thus, trade and service businesses that offer customers the option to make cashless card payments in Q1 increased by 2.3% (by 4,029 vs the beginning of the year) and accounted for 177,800 entities.
During this period, the POS terminals network expanded by 2.4% and as of 1 April 2018 amounted to 257,700, whereof 92% were trade POS terminals. At the same time, one trade POS terminal accounted for 476 operations per month of about UAH 113,000.
The total number of ATMs in Ukraine remained unchanged of 18,600. Nevertheless, the number of self-service kiosks (SSKs) decreased by 3.7% and reached 16,400 units.
Indicators of the Ukrainian payment card market in terms of regions remain unchanged. The city of Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv oblasts registered the largest increase in the number of payment cards and payment devices, ATMs and POS terminals.
CB PrivatBank PJSC, Oschadbank JSC, and Raiffeisen Bank Aval JSC remain top banks with respect to the number of payment cards issued and the expansion of the card processing infrastructure.
For reference: As of 1 April 2018, 77 banks operating in Ukraine are card payment system members.