About 85% Of Romanians In Urban Areas Have Bank Cards, 32% Make Card Payments Weekly - Poll

The poll shows that 10% of the Romanians who own a bank card use it to make payments two or three times a week, and 22% of them use it once a week.

About 24% Romanians make bank card payments two or three times a month, 20% once a month and 8% once every two or three months.

The bank card payment frequency is associated with the income per family member, namely more than 900 lei (EUR1=RON4.1997), and the degree of receptiveness towards new products and services, APERO president Adrian Apolzan told a news conference Wednesday.

Based upon a research made by company Nielsen, APERO created an index to measure people's attitude towards bank cards taking into account three indicators, the frequency of using bank cards, the level of trust and intention to use bank cards in the future.

APERO said in a press release that, on a zero to ten scale measuring people's trust in using bank cards to make payments, the index stood at 7.2 regarding people who use bank cards, and at 2.8 regarding people that don't use bank cards for payments. The overall market stood at 6.5 regarding the level of trust in bank cards and intention to use them in the future.

About 71% of the respondents said they use a simple debit card, 7% use overdraft cards, 4% use credit cards and 3% use shopping cards.

Nielsen representative Catalina Melinte said that, in the following years, many of the bank card owners will use overdraft debit cards. She pointed out that people between 25 and 55 years old use overdraft debit cards more often than people between 18 and 24 years old.

Regarding the type of bank transactions, 39% of card owners make cash withdrawals two or three times a month. About 24% of card owners make cash withdrawals weekly and 27% monthly.

Over 63% of the respondents said they don't use cards to pay bills, installments or for online payments. About one fifth of card owners said they use bank cards once a month to pay bills and installments.

The poll shows that women aged between 25 and 34 and with an average to high level of education and income make relatively frequent bank card payments.

Cosmin Vladimirescu, MasterCard account manager for Romania, said the first bank cards entered the Romanian market 15 years ago, but bank cards diversified only recently.

The APERO poll was conducted in the March-April 2010 interval in urban areas on more than 1,200 respondents aged between 18 and 55.

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