The National Bank of Poland (NBP) just published a report on the payment card market in Poland in Q3 2019. The most interesting information contained in this document is the statistics regarding contactless payments. Their share in total card transactions was 88.8 percent, which means an increase of 2.5 percentage points compared to the second quarter of 2019. The share of contactless payments in the value of all card payments also increased dynamically, from 77.6 percent. in June to 80.4 percent in September. This is one of the highest rates in Europe.

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In addition, the NBP provided information on the share of active cards in the entire portfolio of cards issued by banks. At the end of September it amounted to 66.7 percent. which means an increase of 0.6 percentage points compared to June 2019. This means that the total number of cards in Poland is not only growing, but also customers are using them more and more often. This can also be seen by the average number of transactions per card, which in Q3 was 35.8, while the quarter before it was 34.1.

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Interesting facts are also a rather strong increase in the share of non-performing loans in credit card accounts. In September it amounted to 8.9 percent. while in June - 7.6 percent Recently, this indicator was at such a high level in 2018 Q1. NBP also provided information on the share of cards of the two most important payment organizations on the Polish market. And so Visa had a 53 percent market share (an increase of 0.3 percentage points compared to June) and Mastercard - 46.2 percent. (decrease by 0.2 percentage points).