ArmInfo. In Armenia, the total volume of plastic transactions slowed down from 21.3% in 2019 to 13% in 2020, amounting to AMD 2.6 trillion (taking into account transactions abroad with cards of Armenian issuing banks). This is evidenced by the data of the RA Central Bank.
According to the regulator, the retention of plastic transactions in growth is ensured due to the activity of transactions through virtual POSs, the share of which in the volume of non-cash transactions reached 62% or 459.4 billion drams (18% in the total volume of plastic transactions). This, in turn, increased the share of the volume of non-cash transactions in the total volume of plastic transactions from 25% in 2019 to 28.5% (740.6 billion AMD), despite a slowdown in growth rates from 52% in 2019 to 23% in 2020. The activity of non-cash transactions was conditioned by Internet commerce, popularization by banks and Armenian Card of mobile and web applications, as well as effective incentives such as CashBack.
Nevertheless, in the total volume of plastic transactions, cash transactions remain dominant - 71.5% or 1.9 trillion drams, of which 1.8 trillion made through ATMs (95% of the volume of cash transactions).
In terms of cards, the decline in the volume of plastic transactions was observed only for other international cards (HSBC, AmEx, DC), while the upward trend for ArCa, Visa and MasterCard slowed down. Thus, the growth in the volume of transactions for ArCa cards slowed down from 16.6% in 2019 to 6.4% in 2020, for Visa - from 14.4% to 9.1%, for MasterCard - from 26% to 10.1%, and for other international cards, the trend changed from a significant growth (3-fold) to a 12.7% decline. Leadership in terms of transaction volume is held by Visa cards - 1.2 trillion AMD in 2020 (47.3% in total), MasterCard is on the second place - 807 billion AMD (31%), ArCa is on the third place - 481.7 billion AMD (18.6%), and the remaining 3.1% or 80.2 billion AMD are transactions with other international cards.
The decrease in the growth rate of plastic transactions is explained by a slowdown in the growth of the number of cards from 18.1% in 2019 to 4.2% in 2020, of which there are 2.5 million cards by January 1, 2021. In particular, the number of local ArCa cards slowed down annual growth from 19.8% to stagnant 0.4%, Visa- from 23.7% to 5.9%, MasterCard - from 8.4% to 7.2%, and the number of other international cards completely decreased by 6.9% (against 11.4% growth in 2019).
