Paper or plastic

ENAR

Whether for the season’s latest couture, that fancy dinner or more significant bills such as our children’s school tuition, plastic cards are popping out of our wallets three times more frequently than they did five years ago. According to Banque du Liban (BDL), Lebanon’s central bank, there are 600,000 credit cards and more than 1 million debit cards in active use in Lebanon today. While at first glance it might seem Lebanese consumers are drowning in plastic, the main activity for which they use cards is to draw cash from ATMs, making Lebanon far from becoming a cashless country. Credit cards were first introduced in Lebanon in 1995 and were mainly distributed by banks to their wealthy clients and frequent travelers, according to Mazen Raham, deputy general manager of CSCBank, which specializes in payment services for financial institutions. Around 2002, explains Raham, the concept of the revolving credit card became