As of the end of 2022, the number of cards in circulation issued by payment service providers was 2.8 million. By technical solution, proximity cards, the type of contactless smart card that doesn’t require inserting into a reader device, represented 97.3% of the total number of cards issued in 2022 and 97.6% of the total number in circulation.
The National Bank of Moldova says that in the last five years, the number of proximity cards has nearly trebled, which has contributed to the gradual replacement of smart cards which, in turn, previously replaced magnetic strip cards.
Social cards are the fewest in circulation, but with the highest rate of active cards (81.1% of the total number of social cards in circulation). Whereas initially social cards were perceived by users as a tool to withdraw cash from transfers of social benefits, gradually they tend to be used increasingly often for cashless payments.
The share of cashless payments in the total number of operations carried out with social cards increased in just 3 years from 52% in 2019 to 71.6% in 2022, thus approaching the general share of cashless payments of 82.2 %.
In 2022, of the total number of operations performed with social cards, 28.5% were cash withdrawal operations, but in value they represented 75.5% of the total operations performed. While the number of cash withdrawals has been decreasing over the last 3 years, the number of cashless payments is continuously increasing, so social card users are increasingly opting for cashless payments.
The payment card saturation ratio in Moldova reached 1.08 at the end of 2022. This metric shows that every inhabitant of Moldova has at least one payment card. To compare, at the end of 2021, the EU average was 1.7 cards per capita.
