Bank of Ireland sees huge surge in Black Friday and Cyber Monday transactions

Contactless transactions increase rapidly as shoppers splash the cash

Bank of Ireland has released figures from one of the busiest shopping weekends of the year, showing that a record number of 12.38 million transactions occurred, across payment channels including online, point of sale and ATMs on Black Friday alone. Consumers were also busy splashing the cash on Cyber Monday with an additional 11.9 million transactions recorded on one of the busiest retailing days of the year, a 10% increase on Bank of Ireland’s statistics for last year.

Interestingly ATM transactions reduced by over 11% from 2016, with customers favouring contactless payments to speed-up their waiting times in queues. There was a significant increase in point of sale transactions with a jump of nearly one-third.

Transaction volume was up around 15% versus Black Friday last year. Analysing when activity was most active, mobile payments saw peak demand between 8am and 11am but spiked again at lunchtime and remained busy through most of the day. Meanwhile, Bank of Ireland’s online banking service 365 online and Business On Line, which is used by business customers, both observed peak demand between 9am and 1pm.

Commenting on the figures, Lewis Love, ‎Group Chief Operating Officer at Bank Ireland said: “Our Black Friday and Cyber Monday figures demonstrate that customers are favouring purchasing their Christmas presents and big ticket items on the biggest retailing weekend of the year. Clearly this popular shopping weekend is gathering momentum, with more and more consumers jumping online and hitting the shops.

“Contactless usage has significantly increased point of sale usage figures this year and we expect this trajectory to continue into the future.

“Bank of Ireland is committed to delivering user-friendly digital solutions for our customers and enabling consumers to conduct their banking at a time and location that works for them. We provide multichannel distribution platforms with 65% of customer transactions conducted via mobile or tablet and three in four customers are now digitally active.”