Issue 1191 | Feb 2021
Companies featured in this issue include:
U.S. General Purpose Brands–Purchase Volume in 2020
U.S. General Purpose Cards with Change vs. 2019
U.S. Credit Card Outstandings with Change vs. 2019
Market Shares of Purchase Volume on General Purpose Cards in the U.S.
General Purpose Credit Cards in the U.S.
Purchase Volume on Mastercard and Visa Credit and Debit Cards
Visa vs. Mastercard Credit and Debit Cards in Circulation 2010-2020
Credit, Debit & Prepaid Cards
Debit & Prepaid Cards
Investments & Acquisitions–January 2021
Credit Card Outstandings in the U.S.
Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover credit card outstandings at year-end 2020 declined 14.9% from 2019 to $866.28 billion.
Visa
$418.05 billion, -15.0%
Mastercard
$274.78 billion, -15.5%
American Express
$101.99 billion, -17.5%
Discover
$71.47 billion, -7.4%
Full access to the U.S. Credit Card Outstandings in 2020 results is available when you subscribe to the Nilson Report.
POSTED FEB 17, 2021 | PRINT
BNP Paribas Launches Biometric Card
France’s second largest credit card issuer is BNP Paribas. The bank’s 6.8 million credit cards generate over $58 billion in purchase volume annually. This year BNP Paribas will offer 15,000 fingerprint-enabled biometric credit cards to its card base—if customers are willing to pay a $29 (€24) fee. Initial offers have been made to BNP Paribas’s Visa Premier card customers who already pay a $162 (€134) annual fee for that upscale product.
The biometric cards, which are manufactured by Thales, the largest payment card vendor in the world, incorporates sensors from Fingerprint Cards. Thales and Fingerprint Cards have worked on biometric card pilot tests since 2018. Banks in Cyprus, Italy and Lebanon were the first to test contactless biometric cards. In 2019, issuers in the U.K., France and Switzerland conducted trials. More trials are expected this year.
At point-of-sale terminals, BNP Paribas’s biometric card triggers contactless payments not subject to the $61 (€50) per-transaction purchase limit imposed in France.
Switzerland’s Cornercard was the first issuer in Europe to launch biometric cards. BNP Paribas is the first issuer in France to offer them, although others are expected to announce rollouts this year.
INTERVIEWED FOR THIS ARTICLE
Frederic Martinez is Head, Biometric & Advanced Payment Marketing at Thales in Gémenos, France, frederic.martinez@thalesgroup.com, www.thales.com.
Prior issues: 1182, 1162, 1161, 1156, 1149, 1143, 1141, 1135, 1131, 1130, 1124
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