Online and mobile banking payments grew sharply in first quarter

Online and mobile banking payments grew 13.2 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter, as cheque volumes declined to a new record low, the latest payments monitor from the Banking & Payments Federation Ireland (BPFI) shows.

Contactless payment volumes continue to climb year-on-year, with 2.5 million contactless payments made each day in the first quarter, or a total of 228.4 million for the three-month period, the BPFI said.

This compares to a total of 4.5 million cheques, which was about half the volume of cheques seen in the first quarter of 2018. As recently as the first quarter of 2020, quarterly cheque volumes stood at 6.6 million.

Contactless payment volumes, including transactions made using mobile wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, rose by 53.6 per cent year-on-year, while the value of contactless payments rose by 59 per cent to more than €3.7 billion, or €41.6 million per day.

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This was the second highest daily contactless spend in any quarter after the fourth quarter of 2021, when it reached €46.5 million, the BPFI said.

The average contactless payment value increased to €16.20, from €15.72 a year earlier and was the second highest quarterly average after the fourth quarter of 2021. With 84.8 million transactions, valued at a total of almost €1.4 billion, March 2022 was the second highest level of monthly contactless payments after December 2021.

“As consumers continued to reduce their reliance on cash and cheques, online and mobile banking (digital banking) payment volumes grew by 13.2 per cent year-on-year to 34.3 million payments in the second quarter of 2022,” said BPFI head of payments Gillian Byrne.

“This was the second highest level recorded since BPFI began collecting this data in 2016, after Q4 2021. In fact, digital banking now looks set to overtake direct debits during 2022, even though direct debit volumes increased by 4.4 per cent year on year to 35.5 million.”