Published: 25.02.2020

530.6 million non-cash payments made by customers and totalling 203.0 billion euro were executed by the Latvian payment service providers (credit institutions, electronic money institutions, payment institutions, Latvijas Banka and the Treasury) in 2019. This averages 1.5 million payments worth 556.3 million euro a day.

The total volume of non-cash payments made by customers increased by 11.0%, but the total value of the payments decreased by 10.2% in comparison with 2018.

The most popular customer non-cash payments were card payments and customer credit transfers, constituting 66.4% and 33.5% of the total volume of non-cash payments respectively.

To ensure card payments, 2.2 million payment cards were issued by the Latvian payment service providers as at the end of 2019 (1.2 cards per capita on average), and most of them were cards with a debit function.

41.6 thousand points of sale (POSs) and 933 ATMs were available to the public. At the end of 2019, the number of customer payment accounts opened by the Latvian payment service providers totalled 3.5 million or 1.8 payment accounts per capita on average.

It is noteworthy that, in Latvia in 2019, 16.1 million instant payments amounting to 3.5 billion euro were processed.

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.