YEREVAN, November 29, /ARKA/. The volume of transactions by all types of plastic cards grew by 30% in the third quarter of 2010 or 33 billion Drams if compared to the same time span of 2009, to total 140 billion Drams. The number of transactions grew by 29% to almost 2.9 million.

According to Armenian Central Bank data, the volume of cashless transactions by plastic cards was 10.5 billion Drams, including 2.6 billion Drams worth transactions by Internet. Some half a million Drams were electronic trade and 2.1 billion Drams were card to card transfers.

A total of 52 billion Dram worth deals (almost 1.3 million transactions) were implemented by local ArCa cards. Compared to the third quarter of 2009 the volume of transactions by ArCA plastic cards grew by 18% or 8 billion Drams and the number of transactions grew by 21%.

Also 55 billion Dram worth transactions were made in the third quarter of this year by VISA international plastic cards (936,445 transactions). The volume of transactions rose 46% or 17 billion Drams from a year before.

The volume of transactions made by international MasterCard plastic cards grew by 35% or 5.5 billion Drams to 21 billion Drams. Also 12 billion Dram worth 235.146 deals were made by other plastic cards. Their volume if compared to 2009 third quarter, grew by 1.7 billion Drams.

The Central Bank said also the number of effective ArcA cards grew by 1.2% from quarter two 2010 (3.167 new cards were issued). Overall, there are 299,352 ArCa cards now. The number of international plastic cards grew by 11.6% or 39,813 cards. Particularly, the number of VISA cards grew by 12% ( 2,6721 new cards) to 249,508. The number of MasterCard grew by 13% ( 11,273 ) to 96,660. Twenty Armenian commercial banks issue and service plastic cards. Nineteen of them are participants in a single payment system ArCa. ($1 – 360.17 Drams). -0-