Sberbank and OFD Platform – a fiscal data operator employed by SberData, Sberbank’s big data analytics and processing initiative – have analyzed how businesses in Russia are steering away from cash payments, Sberbank’s website reports. According to OFD Platform data, the average increase in 3Q19 cashless payments is 5 pp y-o-y. Sberbank’s estimate is 4.8 pp which is really close to OFD’s. The only category in which the metric dropped by 1 pp is Hotels and Motels, which slid to 55% bps in 3Q19, compared to 56% bps in 3Q18. This is most likely a temporal change.
However, it is growing harder to increase the proportion of cashless payments in some categories, said analysts in a SberData research, named the Ranking of Cashless Cities and Regions.
Businesses are foregoing cash payments in the Restaurants, Cafés and Cafeterias and Electronics categories slower. At the same time, these categories are in the list of the most cashless businesses. The proportion of cashless payments is 69% in Restaurants, 64% in Electronics and 58% in Cafés and Cafeterias.
The proportion of cashless payments grew significantly in retail. Compared to 2018, the metric jumped 6–7 pp in the Supermarket, Hypermarkets, and Corner Stores categories. The Clothes category added 8 pp in cashless payments. These categories are more likely to further decrease the number of cash payments, as their volume of business is the largest. It is 66% in Clothes, 53% in Supermarkets, 50% in Hypermarkets, and 37% in Corner Stores.
SberData analysts also noted that AOVs keeps going down. They believe that it was caused by the evolving cashless payments infrastructure. In the third quarter, AOV dropped by about 3% y-o-y. The only exception is the Clothes category where the figure increased by 5% on average. AOV remained the same in the Corner Stores category. At the same time, the aggregate nominal amount of cashless spending accelerates 14% y-o-y on average.