Many commentators at this time are attempting to discern where payments in the UK may be heading. What impact will the current Covid-19 crisis have on spending patterns, consumer preferences and business practices? These are challenging questions to address at a time when lockdown is only now starting to gradually be lifted throughout the UK and many parts of the economy are still ‘on hold’.
However, what we can certainly do is understand the background against which the current crisis is unfolding. To this end, UK Finance’s UK Payment Markets 2020, published today, considers trends in payments in the UK up until the end of 2019, identifies key recent trends in payments, and discusses what this tells us about consumers, businesses and government. And one of the things we can see is that recent trends in payments have inadvertently left the UK far better prepared to cope with payments under lockdown than we would have been a decade earlier.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that during lockdown we have increasingly turned to online shopping, card payments and online banking. However, this is nothing new in the UK.
The overwhelming trend in payments over the past decade or more has been the declining use of cash and the growth in use of debit cards to make payments.
The new findings published by UK Finance show that cards were used for more than half of all payments in the UK during 2019 (51 per cent), the first time that this threshold has been passed.