QCOSTARICA — Costa Rica stands out in the Latin American panorama for its rapid change in payment preferences, where debit and credit cards, as well as digital wallets, are replacing cash as the preferred payment method.
Two payment method surveys were conducted in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries in 2021 and 2023 by McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm, involving over 15,000 participants.
According to the report, “La rápida evolución de los medios de pagos en Latinoamérica“, Costa Rica is positioned among the 10 Latin American countries that use cash the least, with 28% of its population preferring physical money for transactions. Argentina (25%) and Chile (13%) are among the countries with the lowest cash usage rates in the region.
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The consultancy highlighted that bancarización (bankingization) was strongly stimulated by the proliferation of new payment proposals and the COVID-19 pandemic, which led many to venture into online banking and electronic commerce due to the closure of stores and bank offices during the lockdown.
In the case of Costa Rica, Costa Rican banks offer more than 90 products that users can carry out digitally through platforms developed by financial entities, highlighted the director of the Asociación Bancaria Costarricenseb (ABC), the Costa Rican Banking Association.
“After the pandemic, the habit continued, and a larger portion of the population began to use financial services,” highlighted the report from McKinsey & Company.
Along these lines, the executive director of ABC, María Isabel Cortés Cantillo, stressed that the penetration of digital channels is the product of a “first world” payment system and the sum of the efforts made by the entities to facilitate the access of users of financial services to these channels in an agile and secure way.
“There is no doubt that the pandemic accelerated the pace of technological transformation and in two years all banks managed to have electronic branches available through which they today offer an average of 97 procedures digitally,” she highlighted.
Cortés added that on the other hand, downloads of mobile applications skyrocketed in 2020 precisely as a result of COVID-19 and that, since then, all banks have also offered this digital channel to their clients where funds transfers are mainly made.
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Precisely, according to the Estudio de Tarjetas de Pago de la Oficina del Consumidor Financiero (OCF) – Payment Card Study of the Financial Consumer Office – carried out in 2022, 89% of people use the Sistema Nacional de Pagos Electrónicos (Sinpe Móvil) to make transfers to family and friends, 50% of people use it at least once a week and 17% use it every day.
The head of the Costa Rican Banking Association also pointed out that the entities have made an additional investment in security systems so that users of these services can be provided safely and announced that, in the next few days, they will launch an initiative, which will seek to educate the elderly and at-risk individuals on how to safely navigate digital platforms.
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