This year, the upgrading trend of card market has continued, while banks’ portfolios have become more complex in order to meet the clients’ demand. In the midst of visible market growth, division of products, slight advance of credit cards and shipping of premium cards were the highlights of this year’s evolution of card market.

In the near future, credit cards will be seen as flexible crediting tools, more accessible than consumer credits, insiders said, mentioning that the growth pace of card market enhanced once with the change of Romanian consumers’ behavior.

“Once with the market development and consumption behavior of Romanians, the growth pace of card market speeded up. The development of infrastructure and acceptance network remains very important factors, as they allow large-scale usage of the cards. This is one of the reasons why prepaid cards haven’t been yet delivered in Romania”, said Catalin Cretu, general manager for Romania at Visa Europe.

Romanian market braced for debit cards once with the need to move to a more advanced level of salary payment and in an attempt to keep up with the development pace of the European markets.

“However, Romanian consumers continued to use debit cards for a long time only to withdraw money from the cash dispensers rather than making payments with it. This reticent outset has influenced the keenness for credit cards that were encouraging the payment at retailers, the withdrawal fees being much higher than for debit cards”.

Furthermore, the credit card has been considered for a long time a very expensive product for many Romanian consumers, as many of them didn’t have salaries high enough to afford a credit card.

Credit card transactions rose 13.7%in second quarter. If in March 31, the transaction volume accounted for 548 million lei (147 million euros), the June 30’s the latter offi