Increased use of the new digital solutions and changed user habits during payments that are usually used in the payment area in the third quarter of 2021

Skopje, 4 January 2022

Digital transformation, as a necessity of every market, especially encouraged by the changed standards of living created by the COVID-19pandemic, both globally and in our country, contributed to a constant growth of the use of digital payment solutions, as the most adequate for their simple, available, safe and technologically smart execution.

Also in the third quarter of 2021, payment cards issued by issuers in the country are increasingly used by the citizens for payment in the trade in the country,which led to a high annual growth in the value and the number of executed transactions of 16% and 14.9%, respectively.The annual growth of the number of the payments in the trade, which results primarily from the high annual growth of the number of the payments with payment cards at the virtual(Internet) points of sale(40.8%), continues also in the third quarter of2021 and is higher by 4.3 times compared to the annual growth in the same quarter of2020. Regarding the use of the payment cards at the physical points of sale, in the third quarter of2021, there was a high annual growth of 12.8%, which is higher by2.9 times than the annual growth registered in the same quarter of2020.

In terms of the payments with a credit transfer, in the third quarter of2021, there was also a high growth in the citizens' payments, whereby the annual growth in the value of transactions amounts to 30.3%, while in the number of executed transactions it is 50.6%.

E-banking and its use when initiating credit transfers continued to register a trend of growth, which existed even before the COVID-19pandemic,but was additionally driven by the digital transformation during the pandemic. Thus, also in the third quarter of2021, the use of electronically initiated credit transfers increased by 22.2% on an annual basis in the number, i.e. by 31.4% in the value of executed transactions, compared to the same period of2020, when they registered an annual growth of 35.9% in the number, i.e. of 30.8% in the value of executed transactions.