Mastercard lead over Visa by number of cards issued in Ukraine narrows in Jan-Oct 2024 - NBU

MOSCOW. Dec 27 (Interfax) - The Visa payment system increased its share of the Ukrainian payment card market from 43.1% to 45.8% in January-October 2024, while this presence of Mastercard, Visa's main rival, declined from 56.4% to 53.8% over this period, Ukrainian media said, citing data from the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU).

The total number of active Visa cards rose by 2.75 million to 25.24 million in January-October 2024, alongside an increase in the issuance of Mastercard payment system cards by 0.3 million to 29.68 million.

The total market share of Visa cards issued in January-October 2024 grew from 45.2% to 46.7, whereas Mastercard's market share decreased from 54.4% to 53%. In absolute terms, the number of Visa cards rose by 6.23 million to 58.27 million, and the number of cards of the Mastercard system increased by 3.54 million to 66.13 million.

Over the past few years, Visa has been closing the gap with its competitor, in particular, from 36.4 percentage points in early 2020 to 11.9 percentage points in early 2023. However, last year Mastercard again expanded its lead over Visa to 13.2 percentage points, but this lead shrank to a mere 8.1 percentage points in early November this year.

In early March 2024, Visa recently appointed Kristina Dorosh as its senior vice president, regional manager in 17 countries, including Ukraine. Dorosh succeeded Vera Platonova in this position, while the latter was promoted to global Chief Revenue Officer for Money Movement Solutions and head of regional departments for Visa Direct regional sales and solution development, cross-border solutions (VXBS) and B2B Connect.

It became known this fall that Monobank, the second largest bank in the Ukrainian market with more than active 9,000 cards, decided to switch the overwhelming majority of its clients to Visa cards, without providing details of the move.

Meanwhile, the number of Prostir national payment system cards dropped from 252,000 to 149,000 in the first five months of 2024, but rose to 197,000 over the five subsequent months. Thus, Prostir currently accounts for a mere 0.4% of the Ukrainian payment card market versus around 1% in early 2020.