Trends in digital payments – Serbia’s Digital Payments Index

Technological advances over the past decades were conducive to the payments industry and exerted a significant impact on its trends. Today, payment service providers offer a wide range of payment instruments, applications and services and all these elements often rely on information technologies. Owing to the development of these solutions by the payments industry and their acceptance by users, the processes of payment service digitalisation and digitisation unfold. To track these processes as much as possible, this paper proposes a method for the analysis of payment transactions in Serbia, which captures all the elements relevant for the digital payments industry in our country. The result of the proposed analysis method is Serbia’s Digital Payments Index (DPI), which gives a new dimension to monitoring the evolution of payment transactions, specifically in the digital segment. The DPI is an index that shows the evolution of the use of digital payments in Serbia over time. It is based on five pillars. Digital payments trends in Serbia are in sync with global trends and the most state-of-the-art payment methods are on offer. When it comes to the use of cards and e- and m- banking channels, the number of users and transactions are on the rise, making a significant and steady upward pressure on the DPI in recent years, which means that the spread of digital payments in Serbia increases year after year.