Poles Don’t Want Cash: Half a Million New Cards in a Quarter
In the first quarter of this year alone, 487.7 thousand payment cards were added to Poland. We have had more of them than citizens of the country for a long time now – we closed the quarter with 45.9 million cards – the National Bank of Poland announced in a press release.
We choose debit cards and change the old ones to ones with contactless payments
Poles focus primarily on debit cards, they constitute 85.1% of all payment cards on the Polish market. In Q1, we added 431.7 thousand of them to the pool, and their number at the end of March amounted to 39 million. In addition, Poles had at the end of the first quarter 5 million credit cards43 thousand more than at the end of 2023.
It is noticeable at this the trend of replacing payment cards with those that support contactless payments. Their number increased in the first quarter by 885.2 thousand (an increase of 2% compared to 4Q2023). In this way 98.1% of all cards on the Polish market already had contactless payments.
We paid less than at the end of 2023
In the first quarter of 2024, we made 2.5 billion card transactions with a total value of PLN 298.2 billion. This means a decrease compared to the previous quarter in both the number of transactions (by 2%) and their value (by 3.9%).
In the first quarter the average card user used his card 54.1 timescompared to 56 in the fourth quarter, which was rich in Christmas shopping. The average value of a single transaction was PLN 120.10.
Out of 2.5 billion transactions, cashless transactions accounted for as much as 95.2%
Only 4.8% of all card transactions are ATM withdrawals, bank cash withdrawals or store withdrawals (cash back). The vast majority of transactions are cashless – there were as many as 2.4 billion of them in Q1 2024 alone.
The average value of a non-cash transaction is lower than the overall value and amounted to PLN 74.10 in Q1 2024.
Fewer and fewer ATMs?
As the NBP notes in the report, In the first quarter of this year, as many as 1,216 ATMs disappeared in Polandand their number at the end of the quarter amounted to 20,869. However, as the NBP notes, the decrease in this number is a direct result from the imposed reporting obligationoperating since the beginning of 2024. In this way, double reporting of some devices has been removed from the statistics. We can therefore talk about making the numbers more realistic.
We used ATMs 6.4% less often in Q1 than in the previous quarter – we made 114.5 million withdrawal transactions worth PLN 96.5 billion (a decrease of PLN 5 billion quarter-on-quarter). The average withdrawal value was PLN 843.30.
The number (by 12.3%) and value (by 14.5%) of deposits in cash deposit machines also decreased. The average amount of deposits in Q1 was PLN 2,343 and was PLN 60 lower than in Q423.
