Cards and Consumer Finance in Spain 2008

Lafferty Cards & Consumer Finance in Spain 2008

Introduction

Lafferty Cards & Consumer Finance in Spain 2008 is the most comprehensive research available on consumer finance and credit cards in the market. A mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods is used by a dedicated team of in-house researchers and analysts to produce accurate and unbiased data. It comprises of 11 sections: key facts, demographics, the economy, consumer credit market, cards market, credit cards profit pool, pricing and enhancements, networks, credit cards issuers, merchant acquiring & processing and other cards market information. The report is reader friendly through the use of a bullet point format and graphs, pie charts and tables to help illustrate key data. Industry experts are always on hand to talk you through any data queries.

Highlights Spain remains a cash-orientated economy and household debt remains relatively low. Major lenders anticipate significant growth in consumer lending.

New entrants have led to increased competition in the Spanish card market.

Spain has the highest card acceptance rate in Europe, with almost 700,000 merchants covering 75 percent of retail business.

In the event that Spain faces a deeper recession, cardholders are likely to default on their credit cards in order to focus efforts on repayment of their mortgages, rather than lose their homes. Deteriorating loan portfolios, coupled with decreasing transactional income, is forcing the banks to focus on fee rather than interest-bearing revenues.
In addition, in a more long-standing challenge to card borrowing, Spanish issuers tend not to clearly distinguish between credit and debit cards, a historical development derived from seeing all cards as merely payment instruments and cash substitutes and disregarding the role of credit cards as vehicles for loans.