Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 22
By Fakhri Vakilov – Trend:
The number of payment cards in circulation in Kazakhstan increased by 23 percent and amounted to 24.1 million by the end of February 2019, Trend reports with reference to ranking.kz.
The share of cards of international systems increased from 99.56 percent to 99.99 percent.
The number of active cards for the same period increased by 28.4 percent, to 12.7 million.
Of these, the share of international systems for the year increased from 99.67 percent to 99.99 percent.
Among active cards, credit cards show a high rate of annual growth: by the end of February 2019, their number almost doubled to 2.7 million cards, a year earlier a growth in the same period was 31.9 percent.
The number of active debit cards for the year increased by 18.5 percent, to 9.7 million, a year earlier there was an increase of 19.3 percent.
The number of debit cards with a credit limits and prepaid for the year increased by 8.4 percent to 375,200, a year earlier their number decreased by 2.7 percent.
The interest in the “credit card” market of the two most popular international payment systems in Kazakhstan, Visa and MasterCard, is radically different.
So, if Visa has 34.1 percent share of credit cards among active ones (a year earlier - 21.1 percent), then MasterCard has only 1.9 percent (a year earlier - 3 percent).
If by the total number of active cards Visa is ahead of MasterCard by 76.2 percent (7.6 million against 4.3 million cards), then by the number of active credit cards the difference is almost 31 times: for Visa - 2.6 million (+98, 9 percent per year), MasterCard - only 83,400 (-3 percent per year).
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