In 2020, the Government forced tens of thousands of businesses in the Hospitality and Retail sector to close their doors. This created a huge decline in transactions which has affected a number of businesses down the supply chain. From our figures, we can see that these closures had detrimental effects with card payments down 30% in 2020 compared to 2019, with cash seeing an even larger drop.
Over the past 2 years, merchant terminals have more than doubled and we’ve seen an increase in our total merchant companies. Throughout 2021 there has been a substantial rise in monthly transactions compared to the year before, even with the Government’s promotion of the ‘Eat Out To Help Out’ scheme in August 2020. Looking at a month on month view, there has been a 65% increase in transactions during August 2021 compared to August 2020. This would be down to restrictions easing, the abolishment of social distancing and businesses returning back to normality. As well as this, many establishments asked for card only payments which meant the usage of cash has fallen to 40% whilst card usage has risen to 60%.
If we continue to see the growth that we experienced over the last 18 months, from our estimations, we can foresee that in the next 12 months we will process well over £3 Billion in card payments through our largest EFT partner.
