Payment Cards On The Increase

The Retail Banking Search in its recent research, titled Payment Cards Western Europe 2006, have reported that the one place where payment cards have increased most over the last couple of years has been in Turkey, whom have seen a 50% rise in the numbers of payment cards.

The RBS research also found that even though a country such as Turkey was seeing such a massive growth in payment cards, they still don’t come close to the biggest payment card market, which is the UK and we account for over 20% of the whole Western European market.

In all Western Europeans now hold a whopping 721 million payment cards with scope for many millions more to take on the cards, though the research did state that they’re findings showed that nearly every person who could hold a payment card in Western Europe, actually owns two.

Of this, 721 million little pieces of plastic that is circulating in the region, 79% of those carry international branding, such as MasterCard, Visa Electron and Maestro with the payment cards under the Visa Electron and Maestro umbrella accounting for over half of the market share, though MasterCard and Maestro do have more payment cards out there than Visa and Visa Electron, even though Visa is the main payment card in Western Europe.

If you break down the 721 million payment cards, you will find that four fifths of all the cards belong to only six countries, we already know that the UK has the largest share with 166 million payment cards, then Germany come in as the second biggest issuer of these cards with 123 million, both are then followed by France, Spain Turkey who have seen the largest growth recently and the Italians.

The reason s that we could see this figure of 721 million payment cards rising, is that when you look at other countries such as Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Finland and Norway and see that all of those countries have less than 10 million payment card customers, then the levels of these cards will only get higher and higher.