THE DEBIT AND CREDIT CARD MARKET IN ROMANIA. A MACROECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE

Credit is one of the core elements of a modern economy and easy access to credit is a hallmark of the development of the financial sector in a country. Credit cards have been in use, in many places of the world, for more than 60 years now and, in a lot of countries, having a credit card is the norm for most people. This, however, has not been the case for Romania where the market penetration of credit cards has been very limited at best. In this paper we aim to provide an overview of the debit and credit card market in Romania. We avoid focusing only on credit cards because of their limited scope at the moment of writing this paper and instead would like to determine whether they are not used because Romanians do not want to take on credits or because it is not easy to use cards as a means of payment. The paper is structured in two parts. In the first section we provide a presentation of the banking sector in Romania and how it has been impacted by the financial crisis of the last couple of years. This is followed up with a presentation of the debit and credit card market, in which we discuss both the number of transactions, by type and card, and the value of these operations. Our temptative conclusion is that the main limit on this market is the ease of use which, while improving, has not yet reach its potential. A more in-depth research, using methods specific to time-series analysis, would have been preferable, however the data series are too short at the moment and the results would have been questionable