Joseph Wilk of NJ on Financial Growth: Recent Increases in Credit Card And Debit Card Use

In the last several years, credit and debit card use has increased exponentially. Debit cards have grown faster than credit cards, at a rate of 30% per year, while credit cards have only grown at a rate of 10% per year. Joseph Wilk knows that debit cards are growing more quickly because users recognize them as a more financially conservative form of payment. Former credit card users have been made hesitant by several years in which the national financial scene was tenuous. Joseph Wilk owner of Millennium Merchant Services offered us more information on what this growth looks like.

According to Joseph Wilk, Visa and MasterCard, in particular, have seen significant growth, and the debit card transactions from these 2 card associations represent 52% of all electronic transactions. Visa and MasterCard processed $3.8 trillion dollars in sales in 2010, up from only $2.4 trillion the year before. That $3.8 million dollars represents 50 billion individual transactions made on the 878.8 million Visa and MasterCard credit and debit cards currently in circulation. Joseph Wilk knows that in 2009 Visa and MasterCard only represented 33 billion transactions – that’s a substantial increase in only a year!

Another change that Joseph Wilk has observed in an increase in the use of prepaid cards. Similar to debit cards in terms of immediacy of payment, it is expected that prepaid cards will represent 9.3% of online retail purchases by 2014, up from 5.8% in 2009. The use of prepaid cards also represents an increasingly cautious credit industry which is limiting the issuing of cards to only the most qualified applicants. Overall, says Joseph Wilk, credit card and debit card use is increasing, but it is doing so in a way that represents a more cautious financial outlook and the active replacing of cash and checks by debit cards among younger people.