Over 94 percent of the country’s bank branches are now offering Real-Time Online Branches (RTOB) services as 50 more branches were added to the RTOB network during the third quarter of the current fiscal year (FY13), said the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP in its third quarterly Payment Systems Review released on Wednesday. Overall, the central bank said, 9,946 branches of banks out of 10,535 now offer RTOB services across the country. The volume of overall e-banking transactions in the country also increased by 3.47 percent amounting to 82.21 million transactions and value of e-banking transactions registered a growth of 4.37 percent reaching Rs 7.9 trillion during the quarter in review, SBP said. The Payment Systems infrastructure in the country maintained an increasing growth trend and 217 more Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) were installed by various banks bringing the total number of ATMs in the country to 6,449. The SBP review said the number of plastic cards in the country also witnessed an increase of 5.06 percent in the third quarter, reaching 21.77 million. In comparison with other cards, debit cards have shown the highest percentage growth of about 5.41 percent which has raised the total number of debit cards so far issued, to 19.57 million. Moreover, debit cards have the highest share in the total number of plastic cards issued in the country which is 89.94 percent in the current quarter of FY 13.
Transactions through debit cards have also increased, both in volume and value, as compared to the previous quarter which are 6.2 percent and 8.82 percent higher, respectively.
The review highlighted that of all e-banking transactions and mobile transactions show the highest percentage increase since the previous quarter of the current fiscal year. The transactions increased by 22.84 percent in terms of volume reaching the number of 1.12 million as compared to 0.91 million in the preceding quarter.
