Goodbye cash, or almost. The latest statistics from the Bank of Italy clearly show how digital and electronic payments are increasingly used by Italians. The merit of the new trend lies in the laws supporting the digitalization of the money exchange that have been approved in recent years, such as traceability of wire transfers, POS requirement for tradesmen, and tax cuts for digital spending. Bankitalia data refers to 2022 last year, when Italy was found to be the European country with the most POS installed: we are talking about 3.4 million units. Here is all the data:
In 2022 there was an increase in the use of family credit cards: we are talking about 1.4 billion transactions with a total value of over eighty billion euros. The data gives an average of 59.24 euros for each transaction, and it has been noted that Italians now also use the card for smaller payments, such as the famous one-euro coffee paid via POS. cards, the average amount of each transaction decreased by the difference compared to 2003.
At the end of 2022, twelve million credit cards, 64 million debit cards and thirty and a half million prepaid cards were active. Bankitalia cites 6.3 billion transactions worth a total of 326 billion euros; these are certainly impressive numbers when compared to the trends of the pre-pandemic years.
In fact, the pandemic has prompted a rebound in digital currency exchanges, promoting the use of electronic payments. After 2020, the acceleration in card or ATM usage reached plus sixty-eight percent compared to 2019. Partly due to hygiene and partly due to the various restrictions that support online shopping, the trend has also been ignited. The debate on the necessity of POS for merchants in our country and the impossibility of the merchant refusing electronic payment (the latter partly disappeared with the inception of the Meloni government).
Source: Today IT
Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.
