Wednesday, July 20 2011 21:29
ArmInfo issues third analytical bulletin on Armenia's card market
ArmInfo. Even though the number of international plastic cards issued by Armenian banks is beginning to grow at an almost equal pace with the number of local cards, the former will hardly prevail on the market in the medium-term future, the experts of the Analytical Service of the Agency of Rating Marketing Information (ArmInfo) say in their 3rd "Armenian Banks in Card Business" bulletin.
They believe that now that the number of corporate customers is low due to economic hardships in the country, salary cards have become the key factor ensuring growth on the card market. Even though some of the customers have switched to international systems, ArCa cards remain a cheap and convenient instrument for small local projects.
The struggle for customers - whose number is strongly limited due to declining business activity - is paving the way for innovative breakthrough in 2012-2013. This is the key trend on the market today and certain banks' expensive projects to create own processing centers are part of it.
Almost all Armenian banks (except for Armswissbank specializing in investment banking) issue plastic cards. As of Apr 1 2011 there were almost 790,000 active cards. 642,000 of them were ArCas - mostly salary cards. The latter grew by as much as 60% as compared with Q1 2010 thereby ensuring 30% growth in the total number of cards. The number of ArCa cards exceeded 322,000 (10% annual growth), Visa cards - 300,000 (47% growth), MasterCards - 130,000 (68% growth). The total number of active international cards grew by 53%.
The experts have calculated card transaction activity ratio, which has shown that banks having small or medium quantity of cards are among leaders in the amount of card transactions. This means that those banks are still oriented toward big corporate customers and give preference to quality over quantity. As regards the banks with the largest card portfolios, only those of them have high transaction activity who not only issue new cards and launch interesting card projects but also regularly "clean" their card portfolios.
The bulletin is published twice a year.
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