Credit card issuers Visa International have given another thumbs up in their assessment of the Lebanese market. In 2004, usage of Visa-branded credit and debit cards increased by 32% to 11.6 million transactions in total. The company was especially jolly about the fact that Lebanese cardholders had carried out 2.3 million of these transactions in retail spending at Points of Sales (POS).
The accumulative value of transactions was $2.08 billion for 2004, of which $300 million occurred at POS, an increase of 31 % over the previous year. It has been a strategy of the credit card company to strengthen the credit card culture in Lebanon and increasing usage of cards at the from issuer perspective more profitable POS.
According to Visa International’s general manager for the Levant, Said Shuqom, Visa estimates their share in the Lebanese payment card market at over 50%. Considering that the number of Visa cardholders here has risen to about 553,000 at year-end 2004, this would put the total number of payment cards in the country at about 1 million. However, the numbers provided by Visa also showed that the vast bulk of cards are debit cards, with Visa Electron cards accounting for nearly 437,000 of the total. Full fledged credit cards of different classes under the brand number less than 30,000 and the top-tier segment of Visa Platinum and Business entails precisely 2,812 plastic carriers.
Arab countries, including the Levant, are currently among the fastest growing markets for Visa International. For further growth here, the company banks on increased market segmentation and new technologies, Shuqom said. The company assumed that the turmoil of the past two months had reflected upon the usage of credit cards in Lebanon but would not be able to quantify this impact for several more weeks. In light of the situation, Visa has halted all promotion campaigns and launches of new products for the first six months of 2005, he added.
