An estimated 3.27 billion successful digital payments worth 5,968 trillion rials ($21.5 billion) were logged in the month to October 21, posting 16.7% growth in volume and up 23.34% in value compared to the same month last year.
Data released by Shaparak Company, in charge of supervising the domestic payment network, show 4.6% decline in the number of successful digital transactions and 7.77% fall in value on the previous month.
The report attributes the surge in transactions partially to chronic inflation. As for other factors, Shaparak referred to the increasing number of receiving instruments and debit cards, plus the use of a variety of payment tools instead of cash.
Factoring inflation, the report presented data in real terms for policy and decision makers. The real value of transactions declined 11.06% compared to the month before, and was down 11.41% compared the same period last year.
According to Shaparak, 1.59 million online gateways were active by the end of October 21, posting 2.01% growth compared to the month before.
POS terminals still are the most popular payment tools used by Iranians. More than 9.55 million active POS terminals were active in the month.
Online gateways processed 230 million transactions worth 717.56 trillion rials ($2.59 billion), whereas it was 2.932 billion transactions worth 5,239 trillion rials ($18.91 billion) for POS devices. Mobile payment gateways accounted for 108 million transactions.
As for the penetration rate of payment tools the report said there were 2,038.78 instruments per 10,000 adults (above 18 years old) during the month.
POS terminals topped the list with 1,545 instruments per 10,000 adults. Mobile gateways had the lowest penetration with 236.39 instruments for every 10,000 adults.
Tehran Province ranked first with the highest number of POS terminals with more than 1.891 million active devices, down 0.5% in one month. It was followed by Khorasan Razavi and Isfahan provinces, with 716,610 and 646,911 active devices, respectively.
As usual, the lowest number of POS devices was in Ilam Province with 65.183 devices.
Shaparak data indicate that transactions of less than 5 million rials ($18.1) accounted for 91.6% of payments processed by POS terminals. Payments valued between 50,001 rials and 250,000 rials accounted for 35.43% of the total POS transactions.
More than 61% of transactions via online gateways were less than 250,000 rials each.
Purchasing goods and services accounted for 88.45% of the total e-payments during the month. Paying bills and checking account balances reached 7.36% and 4.19% of the total transactions, respectively.
Shaparak registered 263.9 million failed transactions during the period. Failed transactions declined by 4.65% compared with the same period last year.
Users' errors were the reason for 85.4% of failed transactions. Card issuers' (banks) inaccuracies were the reason behind 13.17% of unsuccessful transactions. Mistakes by Shaparak network were the cause of failures of 0.43% of failed transactions.
