BFC Bulletins Monthly News Digest
Tags Online Lending Payments Regulation Startups
FinTech is becoming of crucial importance for financial institutions, influencing nearly every financial activity and transforming money management channels. The financial sector in Georgia is no different; here’s a quick glance at how FinTech has grown in the country:
- Plastic cards — plastic cards are widely-used as a retail instrument across the country. Moreover, credit card turnover is up 12% year-on-year, and there are more than 7.7 million active debit cards in Georgia.
- ATMs and POS terminals — the number of ATMs grew by 27 from January 2017, amounting to 2,274. There are also 32,130 POS terminals at trade and service facilities (up 2,996 year-on-year) and 1,432 POS terminals at branches and service centers of commercial banks (down 174 year-on-year).
- Operations with payment cards — The total number of charge card operations in January 2018 was more than 16.5 million (a 20% year-on-year increase), worth a total value of more than GEL 1.5 billion (an 8.5% year-on-year increase).
- Operations by cards of resident and nonresident commercial banks — the number of operations carried out by payment cards issued by resident commercial banks in January 2018 was almost 16 million (a 12% year-on-year increase), amounting to GEL 1.4 billion (an 11% year-on-year increase). There were also 579,000 operations from nonresident commercial banks in January 2018 (up from 565,000 in January 2017), worth GEL 1.3 million (down from GEL 20.7 million in January 2017).
- Internet transactions — in January 2018, there were 2.1 million internet transactions (up 40% year-on-year). The value of these transactions (GEL 75.2 million), however, is down 38.5% year-on-year, indicating that the average value of purchase is declining.
- QuickCash platforms — QuickCash and the microfinance organization BIG signed a cooperation agreement in September 2017 to help increase the online creditworthiness of small- and medium-sized companies. Under the innovative platform, BIG assesses the creditworthiness of a business in 10 minutes without the collection of documents or the submitting of guarantees.
