Cash payments are becoming less common, while remote banking services are developing in parallel and the number of card transactions is increasing. In Georgia, as well as around the world, there are two dominant companies in the bank card processing market - Visa and Mastercard.
According to the National Bank of Georgia, there are 6.2 million debit and 559 thousand credit cards in the country. Which means an average of 1.75 bank cards per capita.
As of July 2021, there are 2.05 million VISA debit cards in Georgia, while the number of Mastercard / Maestro cards is 3.79 million. The number of debit cards of other systems is 349 thousand.
The shares of debit cards according to payment systems are as follows:
• Mastercard / Maestro - 61% of the market;
• VISA - 33% of the market;
• Other systems - 5.6% of the market.
The leader in the field of credit cards is the VISA system, which occupies 41% of the market.
The credit card market is divided into payment systems as follows:
• VISA - 32% of the market;
• Mastercard / Maestro - 21% of the market;
• Other systems - 47% of the market.
More than 1.4 million transactions are made with these cards daily, which total volume exceeds 120 million GEL per day on average. For comparison, 5 years ago, less than 360 thousand card payments were made per day, and the volume of these payments was 39 million GEL per day. Consequently, the number of bank card transactions has increased several times in the last 5 years.
As for internet banking, an average of 250 thousand transactions are made daily by July 2021, and their volume exceeds 540 million GEL per month (17.6 million GEL per day).
