An estimated 3.71 billion retail transactions were processed by the domestic electronic payment network Shaparak in the fifth month of the calendar year to August 22.
These were worth 6,762 trillion rials ($22.46 billion) – down 1.46% in volume and 1.38% in value on the month before, the company in charge of supervising and maintaining the network said on its website.
Transactional value jumped 25.9% on the same month last year when 3.16 billion transactions worth 5,368 trillion rials ($17.83 billion) were processed. In volume terms it was up 17.52% 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 3.28% on a monthly basis.
Real value was again down 17.25% from the same month last year not factoring annual inflation. As per data from the Statistical Center of Iran, the consumer price index in the month to July 20 climbed 1.96% on a monthly basis and 52.22% from the same period last year.
Regarding services offered by the network, 89.55% was for buying goods and services. Buying cellphone recharges and paying bills was second at 6.37% while 4.08% of the transactions were for checking bank a/c balances.
The number of instruments for processing payments was down 0.54% from the earlier month, reaching 8.77 million.
However, growth was noticeable in online payment gateways, which increased 9.06% from 423,273 to 461,632. Total POS terminals, mostly used by retail outlets, declined 0.85% to 8.1 million devices, and the number of mobile payments plunged 10.93% to 128,515 in the month.
Decline in the number of payment gateways is attributed largely to the stringent measures taken by the Iran National Tax Administration (INTA) obliging owners of gateways to connect their devices to the INTA database or stop using them.
As is the norm, POS devices topped the list of instruments with the biggest market share at 93.28%. This was followed by online payment gateways at 5.26% and mobile instruments 1.46%.
Processing more than 3.43 billion transactions worth 5,740 trillion rials ($19.06 billion), POS devices accounted for 92.43% of the total volume of transactions.
Based on the report, there were 1,420.14 instruments per 10,000 adults (above 18 years old) and POS terminals topped the list with 1,324.68 instruments per 10,000 adults.
Mobile instruments had the lowest penetration rate with 20.79 instruments for every 10,000 adults. Tehran topped the list of provinces with the highest number of POS terminals. There were 1.41 million active POS devices in the sprawling metropolis -- 3.56% lower on the earlier month.
This was followed by Khorasan Razavi with 619,327 and Isfahan 535,948 active devices. Ilam Province had the least POS devices at 57,999.
Almost one-third of the transactions made via POS terminals were each worth 50,001 to 250,000 rials. More than 52.4% of the total POS transactions were above 250,000 rials.
