OREANDA-NEWS. The number of payments for goods and services through Russian banks-issued cards was up in the first quarter of this year by almost 50% from the same period of 2015, carrying the total volume of 2.8 billion rubles. This is shown by the Bank of Russia’s statistics.

For this period, as much as 2.8 trillion rubles were spent by card holders in the retail and service sector, a 37% growth on the previous year.

Cash withdrawals from banking cards totalled 5.9 trillion rubles (782.8 million transactions), with the share of such transactions steadily declining. In this way, while between January and March of last year these transactions totalled 27.0% of the total number and 61.7% of the total volume, the current year saw their share shrink to 20.5% and 54.8%, respectively.

The number of transactions (including transactions abroad) rose by 37.3% (to 3.8 billion), and their volume – by 23.8% (to 10.7 trillion rubles).

For the end of March, as many as 501 organisations from 707 credit institutions were card issuers or acquirers. The network of their devices for card-enabled transactions was in excess of 195 thousand ATMs and 1.5 million electronic points of sale.