In 2020, 557.6 million non-cash payments made by customers and totalling 181.1 billion euro were executed by the Latvian payment service providers, i.e. credit institutions, electronic money institutions, payment institutions, Latvijas Banka and the Treasury. This averages 1.5 million payments worth 494.8 million euro a day.
The total volume of non-cash payments made by customers increased by 5%, whereas the total value of the payments decreased by 10.8% in comparison with 2019. The total value of card payments in currencies other than the euro decreased by 39.0% and customer credit transfers in currencies other than the euro decreased by 43.8% in comparison with 2019.
"In terms of the volume of payments, 2020 recorded a 5% increase compared with 2019. In the second half of 2020, as people adjusted to the conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic, the volume of payments grew by more than 10%, more than offsetting the decline observed in the first half of 2020," this is how Deniss Fiļipovs, Head of the Payment Systems Policy Division of Latvijas Banka, describes the trends in payments.
Similar to previous years, the most popular customer non-cash payments were card payments and customer credit transfers, accounting for 65.4% and 33.3% 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 at the end of 2020 (1.1 cards per capita on average), and most of them were cards with a debit function.
41.7 thousand points of sale (POSs) and 912 ATMs were available to the public. At the end of 2020, 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.
20 million instant payments amounting to 4.4 billion euro were processed in 2020.
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.