Preference For Contactless Payments Tanks China’s ATM Usage

China’s government-backed push toward the use of the digital yuan and consumer behavior changes resulting from the pandemic led to a decrease in the number of ATMs in the country in 2020 compared with 2019, the Hindustan Times reported.

The World Bank separately indicated in a dataset updated last year that the number of ATMs in China declined from 2018 to 2019 — the first slide in the figure since at least 2014 and possibly since the first ATMs were installed in China in 1985.

The Hindustan Times put China’s ATM total at 1.01 million units at the end of 2020 — a decline of 83,900 from the end of 2019. The ATM-per-100,000 people figure in 2020 was at 72 — a reported year-over-year decrease of 7.95 percent.

The World Bank put China’s ATM installations at 95.6 per 100,000 people in 2019 and reported that China’s ATM figure peaked in 2018.

Globally, according to the latest public data from The World Bank, which is for 2019, ATM deployment continues to increase.

In India, according to the Hindustan Times, the number of ATMs remained constant — at about 234,000 — from March 2020 to September.

The Hindustan Times also cited data from thepaper.cn reportedly from the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) showing a significant decline in non-cash payments in 2020.

“According to data released by the central bank [of China], in 2020, banks across the country handled a total of 354.621 billion non-cash payment services,” the article stated, per the Hindustan Times.

Moreover, the Hindustan Times cited PBOC data that showed non-cash payments in China increased by more than 6 percent from 2019 to 2020. Also, the number of users of non-cash payments increased by 86 million, or 10 percent, from March 2020 to December.

The Hindustan Times reported that a 2020 report issued by a group of banks and other financial institutions (FIs), including some in China, found that the percentage of people in a survey who said they primarily used mobile payments services stood at 98 percent, up 5 percentage points from 2019’s survey.

A Xinhua news service story quoted by the Hindustan Times reportedly stated: “Affected by the epidemic, more offline payment scenarios have been migrating online… Meanwhile, small physical stores such as vendors and fruit stores have increased their online and offline payment integration, winning them customers during the epidemic.”