Thursday, June 28, 2007

New statistics on Dutch payments: 20 % market share for non-bank payment instruments

The central bank published a new statistic on Dutch payments which is on page 13 of its statistical bulletin. See also the press-release.

It is one of the very few statistics that is compiled on a voluntary basis together with banks. Generally the central bank obliges banks to report all kind of stuff. But while the central bank may sometimes have to deal as a supervisor with payments (in its role as a supervisor of banks) it has no formal responsibility for payments as such. Which means that there is no detailed reporting obligation.

Still, in their apparently continued move to openness, banks now provide all their data to the central bank to compile this statistic. Which shows that the debit-card at POS (PIN) is still on the rise (with 9 % last year) to reach the number of 1,45 billion.

Interestingly the central bank also roughly estimates the number of transactions, apart of cash, that are outside the scope: retailer cards, tank cards of petrol stations, gift cards, payments via 0900, sms and wap-billing. And states that this accounts for at least a number of 1 billion transactions and EUR 4 billion in value.

While I personally think this is seriously too low an estimate (with the real number of non-bank payment transactions via the phone-channel in itself almost reaching a total of 2 billion transactions) even the low estimate already demonstrates that in terms of numbers already 20 % (1 billion out of 5) of the Dutch payment transactions is effected by non-bank players with non-bank instruments.