This biannual report presents the state, outlook and evolution of retail means of payment in the country.

Summary

1. In 2021, the national payment system grew by 37.8%
In 2021, the national payment system grew by 37.8%. In the second half of the year, more than 3,419 million retail transactions were carried out, which exhibited a growth of the national payment system of 27.9% compared to the first half of 2021.

2. Transactions with immediate credit strengthened in the second half of 2021.
Transfers of funds reached 1,154 million operations (with a daily average of 6.2 million), these data constituted 33.8% of the total SNP, in the second half of 2021.

Immediate “push” transfers grew, in inter-annual terms (compared to the first half of 2021), by 61.2%; that is, an increase of 242 million operations.
It is worth noting the contribution of transfers to and/or to a Uniform Virtual Key (CVU) with 32.3% of the total transfers.
With a growth of 78.3%, the PCTs were shown to be one of the fastest growing instruments during the second half of 2021, in relation to the first half of 2021.
Immediate transfers that are resolved within the same PSPCP reached 472 million transactions, with an increase of 108%, compared to the first half of the year.

3. The cards showed notable growth compared to the second half of 2021.

With an increase of 20.6% compared to the first half of 2021 and a share of 27.3% of total retail payments, debit cards continued to be the most used payment instrument by the population.
Credit card payments registered an increase of 11.1% compared to the first half of 2021, adding 53 million operations.
Prepaid contributed 1.1% to the absolute growth of the semester analyzed, with almost 8.3 million new operations. A total of 73 million payments were observed with this instrument, which represents an increase of 12.8% compared to the first half of the year, of which 72.6% correspond to PSPCP prepaid cards
.

4. 45.1% of the amounts cleared correspond to checks generated by electronic means -ECHEQ

In the second half of 2021, 7.7 million were issued and 6.6 million ECHEQ were deposited.
Checks cleared in the reference period are on the rise, driven by electronic checks. In terms of amounts, the latter reached 45.1% of the total compensated.

5. Relevant innovations: towards the end of 2021, the provisions of the program known as Transfers 3.0, established in a timely manner by Communication “A” 7153 and complementary ones, and mostly received in the rules on “National System of Payments – Transfers”, “National System of Payments – Transfers – complementary rules”, came into full force.

The implementation of interoperability in PCTs was a fundamental step in the development of digital payments in our country, allowing transactions between different schemes and the realization of PCTs initiated with QR codes with
any digital wallet regardless of the brand of the QR displayed by the merchant.