Data released by Shaparak, the company in charge of the domestic payment network, show more than 131.8 million bank cards were used at least once in the seventh calendar month to October 22.
This was down 1% on the month before when it was 133.18 million, the company said in a report seen on its website.
Debit cards were the most common accounting for 95.27% (126 million) of the total active cards. Debit card use fell 0.89% during the period.
More than 22.06% debit cards were issued by Bank Melli Iran, followed by Bank Sepah at 1194% and Bank Mellat and Bank Saderat with 11.27% and 10.96% share of the total, respectively.
The share of credit cards decreased by 10.42% to 623,316 or 0.47% of the total cards used in the month. In a previous report, the total number of active credit cards was 495,000 during the month to Sep 22.
Credit cards are still not the norm in Iran and for long were limited to VIPs. But now that seems to be changing. CBI policy of promoting credit cards as an instrument for microloan is influencing banks to rethink.
Bank Melli Iran was the issuer of 87.2% of total credit cards, followed by Bank Saderat Iran with 2.86% and Bank Sepah 2.79%. Pre-paid cards posted 1.65% decrease during the month.
The company said 5.23 million pre-paid cards were used at least once during the month. An estimated 17.43% of pre-paid cards were issued by Bank Melli Iran, Bank Mellat was next with 13.66% followed by Parsian Bank 9.34%.
An estimated 3.547 billion retail transactions were processed by the main payment network in the second calendar month to May 21.
An estimated 3.71 billion retail transactions were processed by Shaparak in the seventh month to Oct 22.
These were worth 7,051.5 trillion rials ($19.31 billion) – down 4.24% in volume and 2.14% in value on the month before.
Transactional value jumped 18.14% on the same month last year when 3.27 billion transactions worth 5,968 trillion rials ($16.3b) were processed. In volume terms it was up 13.43% y/y.
Regarding services offered by the network, 89.88% was for buying goods and services. Buying cellphone recharges and paying bills was second at 6.06% while 4.05% of the transactions were for checking bank a/cs.
The number of instruments for processing payments was up 3.3% from the earlier month, reaching 9.53 million.
