Ukrainians are actively switching to non-cash payments – 48% of citizens began to pay cashless more often than a year ago.
So, according to a study of the attitude of Ukrainians to non-cash payments, carried out by InMind for Mastercard in June 2021, some 49% are ready to completely abandon cash payments in the future, and every third Ukrainian is ready to do this within the next two years.
The company also notes that the pandemic has significantly influenced the growth of popularity of digital commerce in the world and in Ukraine in particular: 60% of surveyed users claim that they began to shop online much more often since the beginning of pandemic, and 45% make orders online regularly several times per month.
Also, Mastercard reported that during the pandemic, the “food” segment came out on top in Europe, showing an increase of 26%, the “electronics” segment grew by 24%, while in Ukraine both of these categories grew by 38%.
Also, an interesting trend in 2020 was the growth in the penetration of online transactions among customers over the age of 80 – both in the European market and in Ukraine. For example, in Czech Republic, the growth of online transactions in this category of users quadrupled last year.
“In Ukraine, the market has already recovered. We saw the first decrease in market activity and a significant drawdown in number of transactions during the first lockdown, when everyone was in shock. In January of this year there was also a lull, but January itself is not the most active month. But the lockdown in April did not show such a visible decrease in activity – people got used to it,” Director General of Mastercard in Ukraine and Moldova Inha Andreyeva said.
According to her, in Ukraine since 2016 there has been a stable increase in non-cash transactions by an average of 3% year on year.
“To date, nine out of ten transactions are already in the non-cash segment,” she said.
Also, 44% of Ukrainians prefer to choose shops with the possibility of cashless payments, and another 8% said they were not ready to use the services of shops without an option of cashless payments.
The share of cashless payments in Ukraine in January-June 2020 increased by 5.7 percentage points, to 55.1%, and the total number of cashless transactions rose by 4.1 percentage points, to 86.1% (3.36 billion) year-over-year, according to the website of the National Bank Ukraine (NBU).
According to the NBU, the total number of transactions (non-cash and cash withdrawals) using payment cards issued by Ukrainian banks in H1 2020 increased 16.6% (year-over-year), to 2.743 billion, and their amount – by 7% (year-over-year), to UAH 1.784 trillion.
At the same time, in H1 2020, the number of cash withdrawal operations decreased 12%, and the amount – by 5.0% (year-over-year), according to the NBU data.
“In January-June 2020, as before, the largest number of transactions using cards were payments in retail chains – 49.5%, transfers from card to card dominated in terms of amount – 42.3% (the average check of one such operation was UAH 1,420),” the press service said.
According to the report, as of July 1, 2020, the number of payment cards in Ukraine amounted to 71.7 million, which is 4.9% more than at the beginning of the year.
During June, 36.4 million payment cards (50.7% of all payment cards) were used for debit transactions (non-cash and cash withdrawals), a third of them (33.9%) were contactless and tokenized cards.
The number of contactless cards used in June increased 25.6%, to 9.6 million compared to January 2020, and tokenized ones rose by 22.5%, to 2.7 million.
According to the central bank, over the year the network of contactless merchant ATMs expanded by 33.5%, to 292,000, and the number of POS-terminals – by 11.2%, up to 340,600.
The ability to make contactless payments is provided by 84.3% of POS-terminals, while last year this figure was 86%, the NBU said.
As of July 1, 2020, the ratio of the total number of ATMs (contact and contactless) and the resident population was 8,500 per 1 million people, while last year this figure was 8,000 per 1 million people.
According to the NBU, the regional distribution of the ATM network, as before, remains uneven: Kyiv city, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkov regions are in the lead in the number of payment cards and payment devices. At the same time, the smallest number of payment devices is observed in the west of the country, in Luhansk and Donetsk regions.
As of July 1, 2020, 70 participants of card payment systems were working in Ukraine.
