New formats of banking services and increase in remote payments: regular measurement of financial inclusion indicators
New formats of banking services are becoming increasingly more widespread in Russia: the number of post offices providing certain banking services increased to 36,900 last year, which is 22.3% more than in 2018; the number of cash-out points exceeded 3,700 against 93 in 2018; the number of remote points of service with credit institutions’ agents and employees rose by 3% to 230,400, and the number of remote points of service with credit institutions’ partners totalled 120,200 (according to their first measurement in 2019). These are the results of the monitoring of the financial inclusion level in Russia in 2019.
Moreover, the accessibility of remote money transfers and cashless payments continues to grow steadily. Thus, the number of individuals’ accounts with remote access used to conduct cashless transactions increased by 6.6% in 2019, to total 251.8 million, and cashless payments in retail totalled 64.7%, exceeding cash payments. The network of payment card devices has been successfully developing, which significantly helps meet consumers’ rising demand for cashless payments. Specifically, the number of POS terminals increased by 12.5% to nearly 3 million, and the number of credit institutions’ ATMs grew by 2.3% against the previous year.
The overall number of points providing services to financial consumers in various formats exceeded 4.1 million in 2019 (which is 3.8% more versus 2018). For the first time over the period of the measurements of financial inclusion indicators, data on access points are provided by constituent territory of the Russian Federation.