An estimated 4.8 consumers used debit cards of commercial banks for payment transactions at the end of December 2020, the Bank of Ghana has revealed.
That is compared with 4.5 million in the first quarter of 2020.
According to the Bank of Ghana, a paltry 33,000 consumers used credit cards for transactions at the end of last year.
574,000 people however used prepaid cards.
Whilst, a debit card is a plastic payment card that can be used instead of cash when making purchases, a credit card is a payment card issued that enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services based on the cardholder’s promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts plus the other agreed charges. The prepaid card is however a reloadable card for transactions.
For Automated Teller Machines, the total number than had been deployed at the end of December 2020 was estimated at 2,237. This is compared with 2,123 deployed the same period in 2019.
For Point of Sale Terminals, the number had shot up to 10,489 at the end of December last year, from 8802 in December 2019.
This indicates that consumers are embracing technology for payment transactions, whilst the banks and other financial institutions are also deploying more payment equipment to facilitate these payments.
MoMo transactions
It would be recalled that the total value of mobile money transactions for last year hit a remarkable GH ¢569 billion.
The outstanding performance was largely due to the covid-19 pandemic which triggered upward transactions of mobile mobile in 2020.
December 2020 which was the Christmas period registered the biggest transaction of GH¢67 billion.
This was followed by the month of September 2020 that recorded a total value transaction of GH¢58.8 billion.
Source: Mypublisher24.com