The major four bank issuers sold on the local market 1,200,000 cards since the beginning of the year, but the average 20 percent card usage rate with sellers turns them into a mere deposit instrument with poor investment facilities, given the trifle interest paid for accounts attached to debit cards, daily Cotidianul writes on Thursday.
Only 40 percent of the debit cards issued by the Romanian Bank for Development (BRD) have an overdraft facility, at Raiffeisen this indicator stands at 25 percent, at Bancpost – around 5 percent.
Only 180,000 of the total 2.3 million active cards issued by the Romanian Commercial Bank (BCR) are credit cards. Raiffeisen Bank has 200,000 credit cards out of a total of 1,200,000 cards and Bancpost – 29,000 out of about 3,000,000 issued cards.
Only Raiffeisen Bank reports a reasonable card usage rate with sellers, a major indicator of the card market’s maturity. “Our credit cards utilization rate for payments to sellers is higher than 70 percent,” says a Raiffeisen Bank official.
At the Romanian Commercial Bank this indicator is a little higher than 10 percent, at BRD it is 27 percent and at Bancpost – 5.5 percent.
“As far as card utilization at sellers is concerned, things moved slowly in the beginning. The consumers’ mentality had to change, for people to no longer stand in line to withdraw cash from teller machines, but start paying with the card,” says Denisa Mateescu, MasterCard Europe director for South-Eastern Europe.
Referring to perspectives, the MasterCard Europe official said the local cards market is “within full expansion process.”
“Debit cards, that are usually assimilated to payroll cards, efficiently cover the mass of Romanian employees, whereas on the credit card segment, growth will become visible only from now on,” said the MasterCard Europe director for South-Eastern Europe.
