Qatar's National ATM and Point of Sale System (NAPS) processed 148mn debit card transactions worth QR92.1bn in 2021, up 23% on 2020, according to the Qatar Central Bank's 13th Financial Stability Review.
Almost two-thirds of these transactions were merchant payments performed at POS terminals deployed across the State by the banks and other e-commerce transactions.
However, in terms of the value, ATM transactions accounted for more than half of the total NAPS payments and the ATM transactions saw an increase in 2021 compared to the previous year, indicating that cash payments in the economy were gaining momentum again, after a sharp decline seen during 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The e-commerce payments through the QCB’s QPay system continued to grow as in the previous years.
In 2021, transactions through the QPay channel, grew by 53% whereas the number of transactions through the ATM channel grew by 8.4% and the POS transactions grew by 25.5% as compared to the previous year.
The seamless support extended by the financial institutions and the merchants in providing contactless card payments for in-store and online purchases to the consumers during the pandemic to avoid cash and contact with payment terminals as well as more and more merchants moving to e-commerce platforms attributed to such a large-scale migration from cash payments to POS and e-payments, the QCB said.
The retail payment system QATCH that facilitates the settlement of bulk direct credit and direct debit transactions handled nearly 10mn transactions in 2021.
As in the previous years, transactions processed in QATCH grew in both value (13.8%) and volume (13.6%) terms over the previous year.
NAPS is primarily used for the settlement of interbank merchant payments and ATM transactions. NAPS connects all automated teller machines (ATMs), point-of-sale (POS) terminals, and payment gateways offered by the local banks to a central payment switch that in turn re-routes the debit card transactions between a merchant’s bank and the card issuer bank and settles the transactions on central bank money.
In addition, the system supports routing and settling of GCC interbank debit card transactions.