The National Bank of Ukraine has published a payment cards and non-cash transactions market landscape report based on the results of the first three quarters of 2018.

According to the regulator, non-cash transactions account for 44.3% of total card transactions of the Ukrainian banks. These are 2.8 bln transactions, which is 5% more than in the previous year. The volume of non-cash transactions has exceeded UAH 2 tln. These indicators have increased by 27.2% and 38.5%, respectively. In addition, the NBU published statistics for the past 8 years.

The largest share, 1.1 bln or 51.7%, of payments accounted for retail networks. Thus, the Ukrainians have spent over UAH 902 bln, and most of all, online.

  • online payments — UAH 312 bln;
  • card to card transfers — UAH 300.7 bln;
  • payments in retail networks — UAH 267.8 bln;
  • transactions through ATMs and payment terminals — UAH 22.2 bln.

Transactions worth UAH 26 bln using the Ukrainian bank cards were conducted abroad.

The NBU informs about the increased payment cards popularity. Their number has increased by 1.3%, i.e. up to 60.6M. Among them, 36.6M cards are active that is 5.1% higher than in the beginning of 2018. Contactless payments are available in 3.6M cards, but this segment showed the highest growth with 31.4% increase.

MasterCard takes leading positions in the market. This payment system boasts 24.9M cards, while Visa has 11.3M cards, and national payment system Prostir with 0.4M cards. By the volume and quantity of transactions, MasterCard also takes the lead with 70.2% of the market per each indicator. The largest card issuers are PrivatBank, Oschadbank and Raiffeisen Bank, however, the details are not disclosed.

Moreover, the quantity of payment terminals is on the rise in Ukraine (+ 12.1% – up to 282,000 pcs.), while ATMs are becoming less popular (− 0.7% – to 185,000 pcs.). Currently, there are 6.7 payment terminals per 1 thousand people. This indicator is the highest in Kyiv, i.e. 17.8 pcs. per 1,000 people. The NBU also notes that three fourth of the Ukrainian payment terminals (78.7% or 2,073,000 pcs.) support contactless payments, including ApplePay and GooglePay.