This averages 1.6 million payments worth EUR 601.4 million each day. The total volume and value of non-cash payments made by customers increased by 6.2% and 21.5% respectively in comparison with 2020.
The central bank’s officials stated that the pandemic also overshadowed the economy in 2021, affecting nearly each and every sector, including that of payments. The opportunities offered by various modern payment technologies continued to expand at pace, and the public was increasingly willing to use them.
As in previous years, the most popular non-cash payments were card payments and customer credit transfers, constituting 63.7% and 34.5% of the total number of non-cash payments respectively, as per data put forth in the press release. To ensure card payments, 2.1 million payment cards were issued by Latvian payment service providers as at the end of 2021 (1.1 cards per capita on average), and most of them were cards with a debit function.
29.2 million instant payments totalling EUR 8 billion were executed in 2021. The share of instant payments made between Latvian credit institutions increased approximately to 26%, while their share in the payments between individual credit institutions even exceeded 75%. The number of active instant links contained in the Proxy Registry ‘Instant Links’ went beyond 600 thousand, while their use reached 33.1 million requests in 2021, according to the press release.
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