An estimated 3.77 billion retail transactions were processed by the domestic electronic payment network, known as Shaparak, in the fourth month of the calendar year to July 20.
These were worth 6,857 trillion rials ($21.49 billion) – up 1.8% in volume and down 5.43% in value on the month before, the company in charge of supervising and maintaining the network said on its website.
Transactional value jumped 22.33% on the same month last year when 3.37 billion transactions worth 5,605 trillion rials ($17.5 billion) were processed. In volume terms it was 11.68% higher y/y.
Shaparak presents figures in real value terms to adjust for inflation. However, when adjusted for inflation, the real value of transactions was down 9.6% on a monthly basis.
The real value was also 20.58% lower from the same month last year when factoring out annual inflation. As per data from the Statistical Center of Iran, the consumer price index in the month to July 20 climbed 4.6% on a monthly basis and 54.03% from the same period last year.
In terms of services offered by the major network in the month, 89.48% of the transactions were for buying goods and services. Buying cellphone recharges and paying bills was second at 6.23% of the services while 4.19% of the transactions were for checking bank account balances.
The number of instruments for processing payments showed 2.77% decrease over the earlier month, reaching 8.8 million.
However, growth was noticeable in online payment gateways, which increased 5.03% from 402,989 to 423,273. Total POS terminals, mostly used by retailers, declined 3.19% to 8.2 million devices, and the number of mobile payments dropped 0.04% to 144,293.
Decline in the number of payment gateways could be attributed to implementation of stringent measures by the Iran National Tax Administration obliging owners of the gateways to connect their devices to INTA's database or stop using them.
As is the norm, POS devices topped the list of instruments with the biggest market share at 93.57%. This was followed by online payment gateways at 4.8% and mobile instruments 1.63%.
Processing more than 3.49 billion transactions worth 5.93 trillion rials ($18.58 billion), POS devices accounted for 93.5% of the total volume of transactions.
Online gateways were second at 4.72% of the total number of transactions followed by mobile instruments at 2.69%.
