Four more players on card market

Half of the banks operating in Romania will be card issuers this year, following the entry of four more banks on this market in 2003, at least according to their statements. At the moment, only 16 of the total 40 active banks are also card issuers. The newcomers on this market will be Romexterra and Carpatica to issue cards early in the year, while UniCredit Romania and Finansbank are set to launch their first cards in May and July 2003 respectively. Furthermore, other banks already issuing cards have announced investment plans to improve their offers. Things are not looking that good when it comes to the number of ATMs in service and merchants accepting payment with cards, though, in addition to the rather poor banking culture of most of the cardholders. For instance, although the market potential is of about 50,000 merchants taking plastic, the number of economic operators that actually have POS-es installed reaches 3,000-3,500. The Romanian card market is still young, but the specialists in this field deem it as promising and estimate the number of cards issued will reach nearly 10 million in the next few years. There are 3 million cards in circulation at the moment. The fiercer competition and the higher demand for card-related services will probably force the banks to allocate more money from their budgets for investments in this field. ZF