ARCHIVED - Cashpoint use in Spain fell by 31 per cent last year during the Covid crisis

Card payments rose sharply as the public avoided physical contact with banknotes and coins

Among the many far-reaching effects of the coronavirus crisis in Spain it appears that one of the most significant in terms of consumer spending habits is the reduced use of cash and cashpoint or ATM machines, with the Banco de España reporting a decrease of 31 per cent in the usage of dispensers.

The bank states that in 2020 a total of 624,664 operations were carried out at cashpoints, the lowest since 2002, after the figure peaked in 2007 and 2008 when cash was still king in Spain. In both of those years the number of operations topped a million but had fallen by almost 40 per cent by last year.

Much of the decrease in 2020 is attributed to people’s reluctance to handle banknotes during the pandemic, opting to use card payment instead, and in the second quarter of last year the fall was accentuated to 52 per cent. The trend was reversed slightly in the second half of the year with a decrease of 31 per cent, but was still far greater than the previous most significant annual downward movement of 4 per cent in 2012.

At the same time, logically, the volume of card transactions increased markedly last year to reach 160,500 million euros, 36 per cent higher than the amount paid in cash during 2020. The total of 86.2 million card payments was a new annual record, and as Spain begins to emerge from the Covid crisis it is reported that the number of operative cashpoints throughout the country has fallen by 20 per cent since the last economic crisis to just under 50,000.