Contactless payments fuel growth in debit card use

The popularity of contactless payments fuelled a 18.5 per cent rise in the value of debit card transactions in December, a peak shopping month.

Credit statistics from the Central Bank show debit card Point of Sale (PoS) transactions rose by nearly a fifth to €4.8 billion in December when compared with the same month the previous year.

Introduced several years ago, contactless cards are increasingly the norm for small and modest transactions.

In the final quarter of last year, debit cards were used in 305 million individual PoS transactions, with an average spend of €41.53 per transaction.

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In comparison, the number of transactions with individual credit cards totalled 42 million, with an average spend of €74.60 per transaction.

The total quarterly value of all card transactions (including ATM transactions) increased by 5 per cent in year-on-year terms to €20.7 billion in the fourth quarter.

Debit card expenditure at PoS and ATM were 5.6 times the value of credit card spending over the quarter.