Turkish banks are continuing to develop their products & services and offer practical solutions for facilitating the lives of card users thanks to the investments they make in parallel with the fast developments in technology. Contactless cards are the most notable ones among these products. The statistics of contactless cards, which have become prominent in the industry due to their features, have been published by BKM (Interbank Card Center of Turkey).
According to the data, announced by BKM, contactless cards are getting widespread day by day. “The number of contactless cards had reached to 6.3 million in 2011 from 3.4 million in 2010 and now it reached to 10.3 million in 2012 following 61% increase,” states Dr.Soner Canko, CEO of BKM. “1.4 million of them are prepaid debit cards whereas remaining 8.9 million are credit cards. It is possible to make contactless payments with 16% of 54 million credit cards that we use today.”
When the number of shopping transactions, made with contactless cards, is examined, we see that there is a boom in the transactions, made either with prepaid debit or credit cards. The number of contactless shopping transactions, made with debit cards, has increased by 141% in 2012 and reached to 18.2 million from 7.5 million transactions in 2011. Similarly the number of transactions with credit cards has also increased by 122% and reached to 8.4 million transactions.
Such increase in the number of transactions had a better reflection in the volume of transactions. The volume of transactions with contactless prepaid debit cards has increased by 171% and reached to €13 million whereas the volume with contactless credit cards has increased by 243% and reached to €50 million. Transactions with contactless cards, the total amount of which was €19 million in 2011, have reached to €63 million in 2012.
The number of POS, which enable contactless payments, has reached to 61,000 in 2012 from 18,000 in 2009. In parallel with this increase, the merchants have started to have the fruits of their belief in contactless payments. The number of contactless transactions per POS, which was 88 in 2009, has increased almost by five times and reached to 435 in 2012.
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