Total number of payment cards issued stood at 44.5m out of which 28.6m were debit cards and 1.7m credit cards
KARACHI - The State Bank of Pakistan, Monday, released its Quarterly Payment System Review (QPSR) for the third quarter of fiscal year 2020-21, which showed that value of mobile banking, internet banking and e-Commerce transactions, all, more than doubled.
The QSPR for January-March 2021 depicts strong growth in the space of digital financial transactions in the country while the numbers of internet and mobile banking users have also been increasing significantly, up 30.5 per cent and 20.3 per cent respectively during Q3FY21 over the same period last year.
During Q3FY21, bank customers performed 309.5 million e-Banking transactions, valuing Rs22.5 trillion and registering growth rates of 31 per cent by volume and 29 per cent by value over the same quarter last year, the report said adding that most of the uptake in e-Banking transactions was seen in internet banking and mobile banking transactions. The report further indicated that the volume of mobile banking transactions reached 51.7 million, (up 144 per cent) valuing Rs1.3 trillion up 178 per cent compared to 21.2 million transactions valuing 467.5 billion in the same quarter, last year.
The number of registered mobile phone banking users reached 9.8 million showing an increase of 20per cent from the same period last year. Similarly, 24.5 million internet banking transactions valuing Rs 1.5 trillion were recorded during this period compared to Rs 0.75 trillion in the same quarter last year, registering a growth of 74per cent by volume and 109 per cent by value, it said.
The number of Point of Sale (POS) machines had shown a substantial growth of 37 per cent while on these POS machines, 25 million card-based transactions amounting to Rs 124 billion were processed showing an increase of 28 per cent by volume and 21 per cent by value compared to the same quarter last year, the QPS report noted while attributing the increase to the measures by SBP including reduction in interchange fee on debit card payments thus improving the share of acquirers from overall merchant discount rate (MDR).
Non-cash based e-commerce transactions also increased substantially in the country during Q3FY21 as e-commerce merchants processed 5.6 million transactions digitally amounting to Rs 15.3 billion compared to 2.8 million transactions valuing Rs 7.1 billion in Q3FY20, showing an increase of 100 per cent by volume and 115 per cent by value from the last year.
Total number of payment cards issued in the country stood at 44.5 million out of which 28.6 million were debit cards and 1.7 million were credit cards. Further, 6.4 million social welfare cards have been issued by banks on behalf of BISP, EOBI, Ehsaas and other government organizations and schemes.
It is worth mentioning that during the last few years, digital payment transactions in Pakistan have shown significant growth, reflecting the impact of favorable policies of SBP to incentivise customers. Expansion in digital payment infrastructure as well as emergence of new payment aggregators had also played their role in the growth.
The central bank vowed to continue promoting digitisation in the country in line with its declared objectives to digitise payment and financial services while SBP also expected the industry to reciprocate the efforts that would in turn increase convenience for people of Pakistan.