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Americans Favor Debit, Credit Cards as Payment
CLEVELAND -- Payments by using plastic – both debit and credit cards – account for more than two-thirds of all noncash payments, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland reports in a study released Thursday.
The number of checks offered as payment continues to fall, the report said.
The study, conducted by the Federal Reserve System every three years, was expanded this year to include new information related to various payment initiation methods and unauthorized payments, that is, identity theft.
Highlights of this year’s study:
- The number of noncash payments, excluding wire transfers, was 122.8 billion, a growth rate of 4.4% annually from 2009 to 2012. The rate was down slightly from the previous 10-year growth rate of 4.7%. Total value of noncash payments grew to just under $79 trillion in 2012 from $72.2 trillion in 2009.
- The number of credit-card payments, which showed a decline I the 2010 study, grew at a 7.6% annual rate from 2009 to 2012. Debit-card payments grew 7.7% over the same period.
- Automated clearinghouse (ACH) growth slowed to 5.1% annually from 2009 to 2012, down from the annual growth of 10.9% over the preceding 10 years. Between 2009 and 2012, the number of ACH payments as a percentage of total payments increased less than 1% while the value of ACH payments as a percentage of noncash payments rose almost 10 percentage points, to 61.3% from 51.5%.
- The number of checks written, while large – 18.3 billion -- continues to decline, being less than half the number, 37.3 billion, paid a decade earlier. Checks increasingly are being deposited as images, with 17% being deposited as an image at the bank of first deposit versus 10% in the 2010 study.
- The 2013 study estimates there were 31.1 million unauthorized payment transactions in 2012 with a value of $6.1 billion.
Published by The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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