This averages 1.6 million payments worth 601.4 million euro each day.
The total volume and value of non-cash payments made by customers increased by 6.2% and 21.5% respectively in comparison with 2020.
"The pandemic also overshadowed the economy in 2021, affecting nearly each and every sector, including that of payments. The opportunities offered by various modern payment technologies continued to expand at a robust pace, and the public was increasingly willing to use them," said Emīls Dārziņš, Head of the Payment Systems Policy Division of Latvijas Banka.
"The latest payment data provide an insight into the trends of another type of money – cash, i.e. dynamics of the number of ATMs suggest that the measures implemented in 2021 and the historical agreement on maintaining access to cash reached with the financial sector at the initiative of Latvijas Banka lead to a positive result, and access of Latvia's population to cash remains unchanged."
As in previous years, the most popular non-cash payments were card payments and customer credit transfers, constituting 63.7% and 34.5% of the total number of non-cash payments respectively.
To ensure card payments, 2.1 million payment cards were issued by Latvian payment service providers as at the end of 2021 (1.1 cards per capita on average), and most of them were cards with a debit function.
43.1 thousand points of sale (POSs) and 907 ATMs were available to the public. At the end of 2020, the number of customer payment accounts opened by Latvian payment service providers totalled 3.1 million or 1.7 payment accounts per capita on average.
29.2 million instant payments totalling 8.0 billion euro were executed in 2021. The share of instant payments made between Latvian credit institutions increased approximately to 26%, while their share in the payments between individual credit institutions even exceeded 75%. The number of active instant links contained in the Proxy Registry "Instant Links" went beyond 600 thousand, while their use reached 33.1 million requests in 2021.
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: https://www.bank.lv/statistika/dati-statistika/maksajumu-sist-statistika.
