More than half of card purchases are made contactless | Payments

For the first time since this technology was available in Portugal, more than half of card purchases were made with contactless in 2023. This, in a year in which retail payments in Portugal grew by more than 10%, both in number of operations and in the total value transacted.

The data are from Banco de Portugal (BdP) and appear in the most recent Payment Systems Report, published this Thursday. In total, last year as a whole, 4.2 billion electronic and check payments were made (that is, excluding cash payments), with a total value of 740.2 billion euros, figures that represent increases of around 13%, in both cases, compared to the previous year. These increases, indicates the regulator, reflect “the context of growth in the country’s economic activity”.

Among these, the most used payment method is electronic cards, which represented 88.9% of the number of transactions. Even so, this method accounted for only 27.2% of the total amount of transactions processed. Bank transfers, in turn, represented more than half (57%) of the total amount transacted.

Looking only at card payments, the BdP report indicates that, per day, an average of 10.3 million transactions were carried out, for an average daily value of 550.8 million euros. The majority of these operations concern purchases (almost 63%). And, in card purchases, there is also new information: for the first time, more than half (53%) of card purchases were contactless (contactless technology), a type of medium that grew more than 30% compared to last year, both in quantity and value.

This is a technology that has been gaining increasing support in Portugal. In 2019, before the pandemic, payments contactless they represented just 8% of total card purchases. In the same sense, purchases online grew by more than 33% last year, now representing 16% of card purchases (well above the 8% proportion that, also in this case, occurred before the pandemic).

The number of credit transfers (the name given to most bank transfers, through which funds reach the recipient’s account within 24 hours) grew by 15.7% in 2023, with a total of almost 422 billion euros transferred, representing an average value of 1940 euros for each credit transfer.

The growth of immediate transfers (which allow funds to be received in the recipient’s account a few seconds after the payment order) was even faster, exceeding 33%. This was, therefore, the payment instrument that grew the most last year, but continued to represent a small slice of total transfers made in Portugal, at just 5.2%, well below the average of 15.5% seen in Europe. . Justifying the lack of adherence to this instrument is, above all, its cost, an obstacle that will soon disappear, since, starting next year, banks will be obliged to apply the rules of a new European regulation that will establish that all institutions that provide transfer services will have to provide immediate transfers without additional charges.

Conversely, there is less and less use of paper payments: last year, less than ten million checks were used, equivalent to 0.2% of the total transactions processed by the payment system managed by the BdP, for a total of around 60 billion euros.