News

Card payments continue to gain ground in UK

March 7, 2017

Brits spent 647 billion pounds ($853 billion) using payment cards last year compared with 620 billion in 2015, according to new data from the U.K. Cards Association.

In 2016, consumers completed 14.8 billion card transactions — that's 40.5 million transactions a day or 469 a second, according to an association press release.

Payment cards accounted for 76.4 percent of retail spending, at 298 billion pounds, compared with 290 billion pounds in 2015.

Food and drink saw the highest payment card spending of any subsector, at 114 billion pounds during 2016, an average of 9.5 billion pounds per month.

The majority of payment cards used in 2016 were debit cards, which accounted for 461 billion pounds of spending. Total card spending in 2015 was £620 billion.

Contactless payments accounted for 25 billion in spending, compared with just 7.75 billion in 2015. Consumers in the U.K. completed 2.9 billion contactless transactions in 2016.

The use of contactless transactions escalated significantly in 2016, from one in seven card payments in January compared with one in four in November.

"Contactless cards are increasingly becoming the payment method of choice for everyday, low-value purchases, with a quarter of card payments now contactless," Graham Peacop, chief executive of The UK Cards Association, said in the release.