How are we spending our money? (UK)

Recently we've been talking a lot about finance and financial regulation, while searching for information on another topic- I unearthed a cache of statistics. These prove to be interesting for both technological and economical reasons.

Technological because these transactions are mostly made with new technology and newly developed situations. While, as a money matter, it deals with the economy.

The statistics suggest that in 2009 there were 608 million purchases made online with either debit or credit cards, totalling over £47.2bn spent and averaging a purchase value of £70-80.
And that in the same period 33.9 million adults purchased online which comprised 67% of the overall adult population.

Meanwhile on the darker side of the equation there was a total fraud figure of £440.3m, which is actually 28% (£170m) less than the prior year.

Suggested reasons for the lessened fraud includes the introduction of Chip and Pin which cut plastic card fraud quite sharply, and even now- we are seeing less and less fraud.
Thre are less ways to steal data under these conditions and thereby this positive trend is great news for the future.

And to grasp the size of the situation- there were 162.6m cards in issue in 2009. Be it debit, credit, charge or ATM cards. While 20.2m credit or charge card holders were using their cards at least once a month.
This figure, again, though seems high, was actually 0.3m lower than the year before and suggested a downward trend on credit spending.

On the debit card side of the fence there were 43.1m debit card holders who (collectively) made 5.9bn purchases, totalling a staggering figure of £264bn and each with an average transaction value of £45.
The impressive figure of 43.1m card holders totalled 85% of the adult population and has yet showed no signs of slowing down.

We hope you have found this informative and yet interesting!

Thank you for reading as always! If you have anything to add feel free to leave a comment or post on our social media sites.

All information presented here is © copyright Carkean Solutions Ltd., 2010 - Not to be used without our permission - The views expressed here are the views of an individual not the corporation