The press-service of the Bank of Latvia reports that payment processing service providers in the country – credit institutions, electronic money processing institutions, payment institutions, credit unions, the Bank of Latvia and the State Treasury – processed total of 730 million cashless payments of their clients in 2022 worth a total of EUR 259.1 billion.
Two million payments worth EUR 709.8 million were processed on average every day. Compared with 2021 the total number of clients’ various cashless transactions increased by 25% in 2022, and the total size of payments – by 18%.
This is the most rapid climb observed in recent years.
This is due to two factors. The first is the increase of overall activity of Latvian residents. The second is the high inflation observed in 2022.
Similarly to previous years, the most commonly used cashless payment methods were card payments (61% of the total number of cashless payments) and clients’ loan payment transfers (38% of the total number of cashless payments).
To ensure processing of all card payments, at the end of 2022 Latvian payment service provides had issued 2.1 million payment cards (an average of 1.1 cards per capita). Most of them were debit cards.
In 2022 residents had access to 43.6 thousand card terminals and 898 ATMs. On top of that, Latvian payment processing companies had opened three million client accounts by the end of 2022.
The Bank of Latvia reminds that the institution organises and maintains the payment infrastructure in Latvia. This includes two fully automated payment systems that provide inter-banking transactions in euro. TARGET2-Latvia is an inter-banking euro payment system that is part of EU’s TARGET2 real-time payment system. The electronic clearing system employed by the Bank of Latvia is used to small payments.
In August 2017 Latvia was the first in Eurozone to start using flash payments – innovative, modern, fast inter-bank payments available 24 hours a day, weekends and holidays included. In such a short period of time flash payments have become available to more than 90% of clients of Latvian credit institutions. It is not an exclusive service limited to any one institution.
The Bank of Latvia also created and still maintains the Flash Links Register, which provide the option to perform inter-banking payments using only the recipient’s phone number without the need to know and put in the account number for each individual payment. This option is provided by Citadele Bank, Swedbank, SEB Bank and Estonia’s biggest commercial banks.
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