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Press
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ServiRed Cards Used for 10% of Household Purchases
Card purchases in 2007 beat cash withdrawals for first time
Purchases made with ServiRed (*) cards in 2007 amounted to 63.34 billion euros, representing a 12.4% increase for the year. While this rate of growth flattened from the 16.01% posted in 2006 and the 17.89% of 2005, for the first time ever total card purchases exceeded total ATM cash withdrawals, clearly indicating progress towards the main objective of the payments system which is to substitute cash with cards in purchases.
However, a long road remains to be travelled, since ServiRed cards were used for 10.1% of household spending last year, up only slightly from the 9.46% recorded in 2006, according to the figure published by Spain’s official National Institute of Statistics (INE). This figure lags far behind the European average.
ServiRed members ended the year with a total of 40 million cards issued, 7.4% more than the previous year. The total number of merchants with card terminals reached 660,241, and there were 32,105 ATMs at the end of the year.
Data for the year shows a 21.4% rise in purchases made abroad with ServiRed cards, which reached a total of 4.7 billion euros, while purchases made at ServiRed terminals with foreign cards climbed by 15.8% to 5.89 billion euros.
On the basis of the card purchases made abroad by Spanish residents, we can deduce that the country most visited was the United Kingdom, for ServiRed cards were used for 1.05 billion euros’ worth of purchases there (32% more than in 2006), followed by France, with 675 million, the United States with 426 million, and Germany, with 263 million.
The analysis of purchases made with foreign cards in Spain shows that U.K. residents spent the most –a total of 2.10 billion euros, representing an 8% rise for the year--, followed by the French with 1.51 billion (+14%), the Germans with 950 million (+10.5), and US residents with 653 million.
Use at ATMs
Cash withdrawals from ATMs, another important use of ServiRed cards, grew by 6.1% in 2007 to a total of 62.26 billion euros. As mentioned earlier, this total was surpassed for the first time in 2007 by the total amount of card purchases. While the number of cash withdrawal operations in the year was only half as large as that of card purchases, the average withdrawal amount of 114.78 euros was more than double the average of 53.71 euros for purchases.
Of total cash withdrawals made with ServiRed cards in Spain, 78.5% were made at ATMs belonging to the card-issuing institutions, 18.6% at ATMs belonging to other ServiRed members, and 2.9% from other payments systems. Cash withdrawals made by ServiRed cardholders abroad amounted to 770 million euros, or 1.24% of the total.
(*) At the end of the year, the ServiRed system had 103 member banks, savings banks, and credit cooperatives.
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