275.6 million non-cash payments made by customers and totalling 99.4 billion euro were executed by the Latvian payment service providers (credit institutions, electronic money institutions, payment institutions, Latvijas Banka and the Treasury) during the first half of 2021. This averages 1.5 million payments worth 549.3 million euro a day.
The total volume of non-cash payments made by customers increased by 3.9%, whereas the total value of the payments grew by 14.3% in comparison with the first half of 2020.
"In the first half of 2021, we saw further changes in the payment behaviour of the population in the unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic. Despite the fact that 5.7% less payments were made in the first half of 2021 as compared to the second half of 2020, the overall volume of customer payments grew further by 3.9% in comparison with the first half of the previous year. Mind that this is a seasonal trend, as the volume of payments normally tends to be larger in the second half of the year compared to the first six month of the year", this is how Deniss Fiļipovs, Head of the Payment Systems Policy Division of Latvijas Banka, describes the trends in payments.
The most popular non-cash payments were card payments and customer credit transfers, constituting 62.8% and 36.0% of the total volume of non-cash payments respectively.
To ensure card payments, 2.1 million payment cards were issued by the Latvian payment service providers as at the end of the first half of 2021 (1.1 cards per capita on average), and most of them were cards with a debit function.
43.0 thousand points of sale (POSs) and 903 ATMs were available to the public. At the end of the first half of 2021, the number of customer payment accounts opened by the Latvian payment service providers totalled 3.2 million or 1.7 payment accounts per capita on average.
12.9 million instant payments totalling 3.1 billion euro were executed in the first half of 2021.
A detailed report on the operation of interbank payment systems, development of payment instruments and other areas vital for non-cash payments is available on Latvijas Banka's website.