The UK payments association Apacs conjointly with the Payments Council released a comprehensive overview on all UK payments data including expenditure on plastic cards, repayments and lending on credit cards, cash machine withdrawals, checks, Faster Payments, CHAPS payments, Direct Debits and Bacs Direct Credits. According to the statistics document posted on the official site of the association, total debit and credit card spending in 2008 in terms of both value and volume increased 6.8% and 7.4% respectively. There were 7.4 billion plastic card purchases made in the UK during 2008 totaling £371.7 billion compared to 6.9 billion purchases totaling £347.9 billion in 2007.

Debit cards accounted for 73.5% of all plastic card purchases in 2008 compared with 71.7% in 2007. The number of check transactions dropped in terms of volume by 2.8%, but increased by value by 6.2%. In 2008, CHAPS sterling payments decreased in terms of volume by 2.8%, but increased by value by 6.2%. Since beginning operation in May 2008, 82.8 million payments have been processed through the immediate faster payment service, reaching a value of £32.9 billion.

The number of cash machine withdrawals rose from 2.8 billion in 2007 to 3.0 billion in 2008.

For more details please see the file attached.