Karachi: The State Bank of Pakistan on Friday (today) released its second quarterly report of payment systems for the fiscal year 2021-22 covering the period Oct-Dec 2021. The report presented an encouraging picture of the adoption of digital payments systems across the country.
The report said that during the mentioned quarter, customers’ inclination toward the use of e-banking continued, as it rose to 10.7% in volume and 22.8% in value of transactions on a Quarter-on-Quarter (QoQ) basis.
1/2 #SBP issues Q2FY22 report on Payment Systems that shows encouraging growth in digital banking. Overall e-banking transactions volume grew by 10.7% to 400mn whereas value by 22.8% to over Rs33tn. During CY2021 volume increased by 41% to 1.4bn and value by 45% to Rs106tn. pic.twitter.com/g9ONr76Lqt
— SBP (@StateBank_Pak) April 15, 2022
It would be pertinent to note that the growth in e-banking transactions is much steeper relative to paper-based transactions, albeit the value of transactions was higher in the case of the latter. The volume and value of paper-based transactions increased by 3.4% and 12.2% respectively.
The report also mentioned that, while the volume of e-banking transactions was almost four times higher at 400 million than paper-based transactions at 101.4 million, the value of transactions of the former stands at Rs33.4 trillion compared with Rs41.6 trillion paper-based transactions.
All around growth in e-banking included expansion in both mobile and internet banking with a double-digit increase in value and volume of transactions during the second quarter. The number of mobile banking transactions amounted to 94 million, while the value reached Rs2.2 trillion, which comes to 18.8% and 35.4% growth respectively on a QoQ basis. Meanwhile, the number of mobile banking users grew by 5% on a QoQ basis, reaching a total of 11.9 million users.
The internet banking users reached 6.9 million, conducting 33.8 million transactions, amounting to Rs2.4 trillion, which translates to a strong 13.9% progress in terms of volume and a 28% increase in the value of these transactions compared to the preceding quarter.
The retail sector also continued its upswing in the adoption of digital payments. During the quarter, a total of 31.4 million transactions amounting to Rs178.1 billion were processed via 92,153 Point-of-Sale (POS) terminals. This shows an impressive double-digit QoQ growth of 11.8% by volume and 32.1% by value. Similarly, the number of e-Commerce merchants also increased by 32.6% reaching a total of 3,968.
The onboarding of QR merchants largely added to this growth. These merchants processed 13.6 million transactions worth Rs26.7 billion, showing QoQ growth of
7.2% by volume and 19.8% by value.
The reports also showed that towards the of end-December 2022, there were 5.4% more cards than in the preceding quarter, reaching 48.6 million cards in circulation which mainly comprised Debit Cards (63.5%), Social Welfare Cards (22.8%), ATM only Cards (9.9%), Credit Cards (3.6%), and Prepaid Cards (0.3%).
During this quarter, paper-based transactions showed relatively slower growth of 3.4% in volume and12.2% in value on a QoQ basis. In the Large-value (wholesale) payments segment, SBP’s Real-time Inter-Bank Settlement Mechanism (PRISM) processed a total of 1.1 million transactions amounting to Rs161.3 trillion, showing QoQ growth of 5.9% in volume and 1.4% in value.
