Card spending continued to rise in second quarter
Almost €19 billion was spent on Irish credit and debit cards between April and June, according to the Central Bank.
That represents an 8% rise year-on-year, as consumers increasingly opted for cards instead of cash.
The vast majority of card transactions in the second quarter – more than €16 billion worth – were done with debit cards. That is up 8.9% on the same period of 2018.
Most of that increase came at the point of sale, with transactions there rising by 13.4% to €10.96 billion year-on-year.
At the same time ATM withdrawals stayed broadly flat at €5.4 billion.
Meanwhile credit cards accounted for almost €2.9 billion of transactions in the period – an increase of 3.7% on the second quarter of 2018.
According to the Central Bank almost €5.2 billion worth of card transactions between April and June went towards online purchases, an increase of 15.8% on last year.
It came as the number of cards in issue rose by 4.4% to 7.2 million at the end of June. Almost 5.3 million of those were debit cards, while the number of credit cards rose to 1.91 million.
However the number of active cards in Ireland rose by a slightly more modest 3.9% to 6.1 million.
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