Fall in Card Payment Transactions

EghtesadOnline: Shaparak, the nationwide payment network, processed an estimated 1.82 billion transactions worth 1.83 trillion rials ($11.7 billion) during the month to April 20 – down 17.66% in the number of transactions and 37.58% less in value compared to a month earlier.

News ID: ۷۴۷۲۹۳

11 May 2019

According to a report released by Shaparak website, the value of Shaparak transactions, however, registered 55.71% growth year-on-year. The report also indicates a 26.05% growth in terms of number of transactions compared to last year.

Factoring out the inflation factor in the nominal statistics, the reports present the data in real value terms to help provide timely and authentic information to decision-makers.

Accordingly, the real value of transactions shot up 5.32% compared to the same period last year.  Compared to the previous month, after deducting the inflation aspect, the value of transactions had a real decline of 39.99 %, according to Financial Tribune.

Shaparak rates its performance in terms of volume and value of transactions processed by its three main receiving tools, namely Internet, mobile and point-of-sale devices.

Based on the report, the number of transactions done via internet fell 1.26% during the aforementioned month compared to the earlier month, and they had a market share of 5.73%.

Mobile transactions registered 0.24% growth in the same month with a strong market share of 6.44%. POS devices in shops dropped 0.78% on a monthly basis taking 87.83% share of the market.

The bigger share of POS devices in processing transactions is attributed to the limitations of transactions on cell phones and the Internet because other supplementary devices are needed to process mobile transactions.

Higher number of POS devices and their increased availability is another factor for their widespread use.

On the whole, the number of instruments for receiving payments registered a 0.69% decline in the month compared to the month ago.

The report indicates that in terms of service offered by Shaparak, transactions for purchases had the lion’s share of the total transactions at 82.29%.

Transactions processed for buying cell phone recharges and checking account balance respectively accounted for 12.64% and 5.06% of the total Shaparak transactions.

Shaparak said it registered 156.7 million failed transactions during the period. Failed transactions accounted for 21.9% of the total payments.

User errors were the reason for 91.6% of failed transactions. Card issuers' (banks) mistakes were the reason behind 6.18% of unsuccessful transactions. Mistakes by Shaparak were the cause of failures in only 0.65% of the failed transactions.

According to Shaparak, more than 1.82 billion transactions (92.1%) were conducted successfully during the 30-day period.

PSP Statistics

Shaparak is a supervisory body affiliated to the Central Bank of Iran that brings together payment service providers (PSP) and monitors Internet and mobile payment instruments. The report also covered the performance of PSPs.

Beh Pardakht Mellat, the leading PSP firm, processed almost a quarter of all POS transactions according to the data. The company owns 21.57% of total active POS terminals.

The data covers performance of Payment Service Providing companies showing that Beh-Pardakht, a Bank Mellat subsidiary payment firm, owns the largest share of the payment market in both volume and value, accounting for 21.57% and 24.68% of the total transactions, respectively.

Saman Electronic Payment, affiliated to Saman Bank, trails Beh-Pardakht with 18.46% in terms of volume. Asan Pardakht Persian ranked third with 15.07% of transactions.

Tehran Province topped the list of provinces with the highest number of receiving instruments. During the aforesaid period, more than 1.51 million POS devices were in use in the capital, followed by Khorasan Razavi and Isfahan provinces with 554,799 and 517,305 devices respectively.

The lowest number of POS devices was in Ilam Province -- 52,952.