Today, 15 December 2014, the National Bank of Moldova, in partnership with the Development Facility of the European Fund for Southeast Europe (EFSE DF), launches a national campaign on the promotion of non-cash payments. The main focus of this campaign is to inform the public about the benefits of such payments. In this way, the National Bank aims at encouraging the use of non-cash payment instruments.
In his opening speech, the Governor of the National Bank of Moldova, Dorin Drăguțanu mentioned:
"The premise that led to the launch of this campaign is that currently, although the number of cards is increasing, largely user preferences are reduced to withdrawing money from ATMs with the subsequent use of cash for various payment transactions. A similar situation applies for the remote banking systems such as internet-banking - a service provided by most commercial banks. Although more and more banks’ customers become users of this service, only few of them use it to make remote payments. And this happens despite the fact that licensed banks developed a range of products and services to enable customers to perform faster and safer payment transactions. The main aim of the campaign is to inform the public that non-cash payments are easy, secure and convenient. "
Monika Beck, Chairperson of the Board of EFSE, said:
“As a strong supporter of Responsible Finance, the EFSE DF is pleased to be partnering with the National Bank of Moldova on this initiative to raise public awareness of the benefits of non-cash payments. We are joining our efforts towards increasing financial inclusiveness and empowerment across the country.”
Although the payment card is currently the most popular payment instrument and the number of cards issued is constantly growing reaching currently a number of 1,253,890 units, only 60.4% of them are active cards. It is worth mentioning that 80% of all transactions and 94,7% of their value that have been carried out in Moldova by the respective payment instrument are related to extracting money from the ATMs and only 19.8% of the number and 5,3% of their value are made for payment purposes. In Q3|2014, a card holder in the Republic of Moldova made on average 1.35 non-cash payments and accessed an ATM 3.8 times. In comparison, a significant 92.2% of total transactions made outside the country with the cards issued in Moldova are related to such type of payments.
Launching this campaign it was also taken into account the need to inform about the advantages of using electronic banking systems such as internet-banking for making payment transactions.
Currently, although most of the users of such systems are individuals, only 11% of them use internet banking to make payments, the other 89% use internet banking for information purposes only, to check account balance and the operations made from the account.
A similar low level is observed in the use of the direct debit service, which represents only 0.22% of the total credit transfer transactions initiated by the banks’ customers.
During the information campaign, which will run for half of the year, spots, talk-shows and interviews on various TV and radio stations on the topic of non-cash payment instruments will be broadcasted. Furthermore, the interested public will have the possibility to access a page on a social network and a webpage, www.faranumerar.md, dedicated to this topic, where useful information on non-cash payments will be placed.
