By March 1st of the current year the number of banking plastic cards issued by the commercial banks of Georgia reached 2.4 mln., which is 1.9 times higher than the indicator for the same period of 2007. 91.1 per cent fall to debit cards instead of 99.1 relevantly. This is a result of a fast growing number of credit cards. If the growth of the number of debit cards for the last year constituted 76.6 per cent, the number of credit cards for the same period increased by 19.4 times.

The growing tendency of popularity of VISA is still notable. It ammounts 76.5 per cent of the cards being in the circulation; It is followed by EUROCARD/MASTER CARD - 13.8 per cent, and the remained 9.7 per cent comes to the share of local cards. It should be emphasized that VISA card share in the total amount of the cards being in circulation increased by 10.6 point during the last year. 

The number of the operations carried out by plastic cards has been increasing. During the last year the operations in the amount of average 270 mln Lari per month were being carried out, in February of the current year this indicator equaled 326.5 mln Lari. 96.5 per cent of the cards used for these operations fall to resident issuers and 3.5 percent – to non-resident ones.

It is notable that according to the operations carried out by plastic cards, Georgia has a positive balance of the operations with foreign countries. In particular, the volume of operations carried out in Georgia by the cards issued by the non-residents exceeds the volume of operations carried out abroad by the cards issued by the resident issuers. Exception is February of the current year, when the mentioned balance was negative and it constituted 3.5 mln Lari (See the chart).

75.1 per cent of the total volume of operations carried out during the reporting month comes to ATM and 24.2 per cent - POS terminals.  Very small portion of operations – 0.7 per cent falls to the internet provided operations, which shows that the e-trade is less popular and less available in the country.