All of us here today, I’m sure, appreciate the convenience of being able to pay by plastic. More to the point, card payments account for a big slice of spending in the retail economy. There are currently roughly 40 million debit cards on issue in Australia, and around 20 million credit and charge cards.
On those cards, nearly 10 million transactions are made every day, with a daily value of around one billion dollars. To put this in some sort of perspective, the value of spending on personal cards is about half the size of household consumption.