Consumers always vote with their feet, and in this case, the new details of consumer payment behavior contained in the Federal Reserve data for 2009 indicate that cash back transactions equaled a whopping $35.2bn in value. The ATM industry might look no further for their missing transactions – maybe they’ve been found at the corner store.
The Fed, which asked respondents for data for 2006 to 2009, says point-of-sale debit transactions, both of the signature and PIN variety, grew at a compounded annual rate of 14.8% in the study period. PIN debit, which accounts for the overwhelming majority of cash-back transactions at the point of sale, grew 15.6% to 14.5 billion transactions in 2009. About one in 38 total debit transactions included cash back.
And, if banks continue to increase foreign ATM fees, these numbers could climb even higher.
