In the first ten months of 2024, Visa has increased its share in the Ukrainian market of active payment cards to 45.8% from 43.1%, while its main competitor, Mastercard, saw its share decrease to 53.8% from 56.4%, according to data from the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU).
According to these figures, the total number of active Visa cards rose by 2.75 million to 25.24 million from January to October this year, while Mastercard's grew by 0.3 million to 29.68 million.
In terms of the total number of issued cards over the ten months of this year, Visa's share increased from 45.2% to 46.7%, while Mastercard's dropped from 54.4% to 53%. In absolute terms, the number of Visa cards grew by 6.23 million to 58.27 million, while Mastercard's increased by 3.54 million to 66.13 million.
In recent years, Visa has rapidly narrowed the gap with its competitor; specifically, in terms of the number of active cards, the difference decreased from 36.4 percentage points (p.p.) at the beginning of 2020 to 11.9 p.p. at the start of 2023. Although Mastercard was able to widen this gap again to 13.2 p.p. last year, by early November this year, it had shrunk to just 8.1 p.p.
In early March 2024, Visa appointed Kristina Dorosh as Senior Vice President and Regional Manager of the payment system for 17 countries, including Ukraine. Dorosh replaced Vera Platonova in this role, who transitioned to the position of Chief Revenue Officer for Money Movement Solutions at a global level and began overseeing regional sales and solution development departments for Visa Direct, cross-border solutions (VXBS), and B2B Connect.
This autumn, it was also revealed that monobank, the second-largest player in the market with over 9 million active cards, decided to transition the vast majority of its clients to Visa cards without providing detailed explanations for this decision.
Regarding the national payment system "Prostir," the number of its active cards fell from 252,000 to 149,000 in the first five months of this year; however, it increased to 197,000 in the following five months. Thus, "Prostir" holds only 0.4% of the market, down from about 1% at the beginning of 2020.