Spending on Mastercard’s payments network has stabilised in the last several weeks after a coronavirus lockdown plunge, the company said on Wednesday, sending the shares of credit card issuers soaring. “Although there will be twists in the road, we have seen early signs of spending levels stabilising and are confident that we will emerge from this even stronger,” chief executive Ajay Banga said in a statement alongside the company’s first-quarter results. He predicted “a gradual path to recovery” to follow the stabilisation, but said that the progress would not be even or linear. The scale of the collapse in spending, evident in results from card issuers over the past few weeks, was underscored again on Wednesday in the US GDP numbers and in Mastercard’s results. Transaction volume in the week ending April 14 was down 26 per cent in the US and 33 per cent in the rest of the world compared with the year before, it said. But the following week things improved, and the declines were 15 and 25 per cent, respectively. The positive trends have continued in the last several days, the company said. https://www.ft.com/content/a6be0127-b99d-4007-b760-a6adb27634c6
More people are going cashless as well to avoid handling paper and coins from a potentially infected person.
POS has been over 80% for a decade. The drop of 35% in MA's POS transactions will hurt them for a year or more.