The ongoing digitalisation of the economy affects almost all aspects of our daily lives, including the ways in which we pay. The Eurosystem has a key interest in understanding how the payment landscape is evolving and how citizens in the euro area pay for goods and services, as well as how they pay to each other. Ensuring access to means of payment, cash and cashless, is at the heart of both the Eurosystem’s retail payments strategy and its Cash 2030 strategy.
To get a better understanding of how consumers are changing their payment habits, and to what extent, in 2019 the ECB launched a survey to investigate the payment attitudes and behaviours of euro area citizens. To capture changing payment behaviour in a timely manner, the Eurosystem decided to repeat the survey every two years.
The second of these surveys was launched in 2021 and completed in 2022. This report presents the results and describes the key trends identified in euro area consumer payments. While the move towards cashless payments continues, as the report shows, cash still plays an important role. It remains the predominant payment method at the point of sale and for person-to-person payments. Nonetheless, cashless payments are on the rise, supported by a shift from purchases at the point of sale to online purchases. The rate of increase varies across countries and demographic groups. Taking into account ongoing shifts in the payment landscape, the report sheds light on the perceived availability and costs of instant payments for consumers, and on the ownership and use of crypto assets for payment and investment purposes.
You can read the full article and survey here.
