KARACHI: The e-banking transactions during fiscal year 2020-21 grew 31.1 percent year-on-year, reflecting substantial increase in adoption of digital means for payment, the central bank data showed on Friday.
The transactions processed through State Bank of Pakistan’s (SBP) large-value payments segment, known as Pakistan Real-time Inter-Bank Settlement Mechanism, recorded year-on-year growth of 60.0 by number of transactions (volume) and 12.8 percent by value, indicates SBP’s Annual Payment Systems Review for the fiscal year 2020-21 released here on Friday.
“Growth has been seen in the space of digital financial transactions in the country and resolved to continue its pursuit for the development of a robust and efficient payments ecosystem in Pakistan,” the central bank said.
Report says overall e-banking transactions registered 31.1 percent year-on-year growth, which highlights substantial increase in adaption of digital means for payments.
“This growth was spurred by major uptake in mobile banking (29 percent increase in the number of users, 133.6 percent and 178.7 percent increase in volume and value respectively) and internet banking (32 percent increase in the number of users, 65.1 percent and 91.7 percent increase in volume and value respectively)”, it stated.
SBP attributed this promising growth to 27 banks’ offering app-based banking along with other entities offering innovative payment solutions for accepting digital transactions.
During FY2021, digital payments adoption for retail transactions continued to show an upward trend. Due to the active efforts of the SBP, the number of card accepting POS (point of sales) machines saw a growth of 47 percent. Transactions processed through POS machines reached as high as 88.8 million amounting to Rs453.1 billion, showing year-on-year growth of 26.3 percent by volume and 24.4 percent by value of transactions.
Same trend was reflected in e-commerce transactions as well. The number of e-commerce merchants reached 3,003, showing double-digit growth of 76 percent.
Consumers carried out 21.9 million online transactions worth Rs60.6 billion on these locally registered e-commerce merchants during the year FY2021, which amounts to significant year-on-year growth of 114.8 percent and 74.1 percent by volume and value of transactions respectively.
These trends point toward healthy growth in fostering a more digitally integrated economy.
Similarly, on the card issuance side, as on end-June 2021, there were 45.9 million total cards in circulation that mainly comprised of Debit cards (65.0 percent), Social welfare cards (18.4 percent), ATM only cards (12.6 percent), Credit cards (3.7 percent), and Prepaid cards (0.3 percent). Collectively, these cards processed 708.7 million transactions amounting to PKR 8.4 trillion during FY2021. The number of debit cards at the end of FY 2021 has been 29.8 million, observing a YoY growth of 11.8 percent and annualized growth of 13.8 percent during the last 4 years. Transactions processed through ATMs also grew to 598.7 million with the total value of Rs8.1 trillion. This amounts to growth of 16.9 percent by volume and 25.6 percent by value on year-on-year basis.
SBP said that the country’s core payment systems infrastructure remained operationally resilient as all channels of payment systems showed significant growth.
SBP hoped the momentum of growth across all key areas of the digital payments ecosystem will continue to strengthen.
“Modernising the country’s payment system and infrastructure is a key priority, for which SBP will continue to work on providing an enabling regulatory environment,” it said.