The plastic cards market is still developing dynamically in Georgia. By April 1 of the current year, the number of banking plastic cards issued by Georgian commercial banks reached 2.6 million, which is twice as high as the indicator for the same period of 2007. 90.8% are debit cards, as compared to 98.8% a year ago. This is a result of fast growing demand for credit cards. If the growth of the number of debit cards for the last year constituted 80.6 per cent, the number of credit cards increased 15.3 times over the same period.

The growing popularity of Visa cards is still notable - such cards account for 77.7% of all cards in circulation. Eurocard/Master Card has a 13.3% market share, and local cards take up the remaining 9.0%. It should be emphasized that the share of Visa cards among the total amount of cards in circulation increased by 11.5 points during the last year.

The volume of operations carried out with plastic cards has been increasing. During the last year, plastic cards were responsible for an average 287 mln lari in operations per month, whereas in March of the current year this indicator equaled 347.3 mln lari. 96.3% of the cards used for these operations belong to resident issuers and 3.7% - to non-resident ones.

It is notable that according to the operations carried out by plastic cards, Georgia has a positive balance of operations with foreign countries. In particular, the volume of operations carried out in Georgia by the cards issued by non-residents is 1.6 times higher than the volume of operations carried out abroad by the cards issued by resident issuers.

74.9% of the total volume of operations carried out during the reporting month was done through ATMs and 23.7% - through POS terminals. As compared to the previous months, the number of internet-based operations has increased significantly in March of the current year: 2.4 times as compared to March 2007 and 1.7 times as compared to February 2008, coming to a total of 39.3 million lari.

The share of online operations in the total volume of operations carried out by plastic cards has grown twofold to 1.4%.

Current statistical information is published on the statistics page of the NBG's website.