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"Card spending soars to nearly £95 billion during fourth quarter"

By admin | March 18th, 2009 | Credit Cards

Recently released figures have shown that spending on credit and debit cards in the UK during the final quarter of 2008 soared to the value of close to £95 billion, with an increase in transactions.

Whilst card use has been popular for many years amongst consumers that want to enjoy the convenience and ease of being able to make purchases without carrying cash or writing cheques, some of the increase may have been down to more people using plastic to pay for purchases because they did not have the available funds in savings to buy what they wanted given the difficult financial climate of the last year.

Card spending is said to have reached £94.4 billion, with nearly two billion transactions made on plastic cards in the last three months of last year. This reflected a rise of around 7.4 percent in terms of transaction numbers, according to industry experts. The data also showed that the most popular form of plastic during that period appeared to be debit cards as opposed to credit cards, with nearly three quarters of the transactions made over the course of last year being made on debit cards.

At the end of 2008 it was shown that the number of credit cards that were in circulation in the UK had fallen by around 2.4 percent to just seventy one million, and the number of credit cardholder dropped by around 2.1 percent to just over thirty million. This compared to over forty two million debit cardholders in the UK over the same period, and around seventy five million debit cards in circulation. The figures suggest that many may be enjoying the convenience of paying for purchases by plastic without the risk of getting into debt by using a credit card rather than a debit card.

Tags: credit card spending, Credit Cards

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