Card payments drop by 34% and ATM withdrawals by 28% as compared to pre-Covid

Card payments at point of sale (PoS) terminals grew by 28.8% and ATM cash withdrawals grew by 4.51% in 2021 as compared to operations recorded during the year 2020 Extraordinary The state of alarm in Spain resulted in orders for home confinement, which meant a pause in activity and mobility.

Compared to 2019 (the last year before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic), card payments in Spain increased by 34.5%, while ATM withdrawal They sank 28.1%, according to data from the Bank of Spain’s Department of Payment Systems.

Before the pandemic, there was already a trend Increasing In card payments, whose number of operations grew year over year, even double digits since 2016, although the year-over-year variation was never as pronounced as in 2021. In total, 6,101 million payment operations were registered at POS terminals in Spain. , compared to 4,536 million in 2019 or 4,735 million in 2020.

In recent years, there was no progressive growth in card payments with Regarding reduction in cash withdrawal. After five consecutive years of modest growth, cash withdrawals declined by 2.8% in 2019.

withdraw money from atm

With the outbreak of the pandemic, physical money withdrawals from ATMs they drowned 31.2% in 2020, which can be explained by restrictions on mobility and activity and efforts to reduce contacts to reduce infection.

Data for 2021 shows Spaniards took money many times Compared to the previous year (operations increased by 4.5%), however, cash withdrawals declined by 28.1% compared to 2019. Its amount is 111,131 million euros, a decrease of 8.7% from 2020 and 11.2% from the figure for 2019.

The number of POS terminals operating in Spain also maintained its upward trend, with an increase of 6.6% year over year and a 13.8% increase over terminals that existed before the pandemic, to 2.21 million devices.

Similarly, the network of ATMs continued in Spain. shrink, after two particularly intensive years of banking consolidation in the region and the employment adjustment processes and branches of most of the main Spanish entities. According to Bank of Spain data, there were 47,639 ATMs in Spain at the end of 2021. This is 1,842 terminals less than a year ago (-3.7%) and 2,862 less than in 2019 (-5.7%).