In the first half of 2021, the search for prepaid cards in Italy it grew by 39% compared to the same period of the previous year. Above all, the age group up to 34 years of age had an impact, which helped to get the trend off the ground. A search for Facile.it who sees these data deeply linked to state cashback, an initiative that has not been refinanced for 2022 but which would have “concretely contributed to bringing Italians closer to electronic money”.
Data in hand, according to the findings of the Innovative Payments Observatory of the School of Management of the Politecnico di Milano, from January to June the number of digital payments it grew by 41% to reach 3.2 billion euros, for a total of over 145 billion euros, with an average receipt that fell, also thanks to cashback, by more than 11% to reach 45.7 euros.
Criticized for not being effective in extending the real audience of card users and for not being decisive in the fight against tax evasion, however, for some it was a strong incentive to change their payment habits. All time Facile.it, in 2019, had highlighted through a survey entrusted to the mUp Research institute that of the 22.4 million citizens unwilling to abandon cash, almost six out of 10 would have renounced it in the face of a form of reimbursement, while fewer one in three would have done so to contribute to the fight against tax evasion.
But the long wave of cashback, an attractive formula used by several companies well before it became a state initiative, continues to be exploited. Even from various credit institutions that have made it their own. “As long as the state initiative remained in force – he explains Ivano Cresto, managing director financial products di Facile.it – some credit institutions have integrated the official state cashback app into their home banking, thus helping their customers to participate in the initiative. Now that the state cashback is no longer in force, some banks have chosen to propose their own cashback mechanism, with the aim of continuing to encourage the use of electronic payments by customers “.
The formula always predicts a reimbursement of variable amount against a payment made with an electronic card. The percentage identified obviously varies from bank to bank: in some cases an initial cashback of around 10% is recognized, which then decreases to 1%, in other cases a fixed amount is reimbursed for each transaction performed by card.
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