Amid a 67% increase in the customer base in Romania, local Revolut users set a new record for the number of payments to traders in 2022 - 203 million, 90% more than in 2021, the company said. Most transactions were made for supermarket and grocery store shopping.

The financial app has more than 25 million customers globally, of which 2.5 million in Romania - the second market after the United Kingdom.

According to the study carried out by Revolut, all categories of expenses were on an upward trend last year, both in terms of the total amount and the number of transactions. The budgets for entertainment (+37%), shopping (+34%), and restaurants (+33%) saw the biggest increases in 2022 vs 2021.

An average Revolut user in Romania spent EUR 2,181 last year, and the average value of a transaction was EUR 18.3.

The same source said that local Revolut users spent the most on shopping - 18% of the total amount of payments to traders, slightly down from 20% the year before. The following spending categories in terms of share of total payments were entertainment (18%) and supermarkets and grocery stores (14%).

An average user from Romania used Revolut most often to pay for regular purchases of food and consumer products (39 transactions per year).

The annual spending budget of an average Revolut customer was as follows: entertainment - EUR 749 per year, tourism - EUR 530/year, shopping - EUR 500/year, food and consumer products - EUR 375/year, restaurants, bars, cafes - EUR 338/year, transport - EUR 298/year, and utilities - EUR 246/year. The smallest spending budget went to health - on average, EUR 191/year/client.

When it comes to the distribution of expenses by category of merchants, Romanians left the most money in grocery stores and supermarkets, and that's also where they made the most transactions throughout the year. The average payment value made to these traders was EUR 10/customer/transaction. Also, a Romanian customer paid, on average, EUR 40/transaction for purchases from clothing stores, EUR 19/transaction in gas stations, EUR 16/transaction in restaurants, bars, and cafes, EUR 15/transaction for telecommunications services, EUR 14/transaction in pharmacies, and EUR 10/transaction in fast-food restaurants.

Romanians also used Revolut to pay for taxi and car-sharing services (12 million transactions), tickets for public transport services (9.4 million transactions), food delivery services (5.3 million), bread and bakery products (3.2 million), telecommunication services (3 million), and digital entertainment products - books, music, movies, media content (2.4 million).

"Another important trend is that Romanians use Revolut both for online purchases or on e-commerce platforms, and for offline purchases," the company said.

Thus, based on the amounts paid by Romanian Revolut users to various merchants, eMag took the first place, followed by Carrefour, Tazz, Dedeman, Bolt, Digi RCS-RDS, Uber, Vodafone, Engie, and Enel Energie.

Meanwhile, the ranking based on the number of transactions made with Revolut is different: Bolt (over 3.3 million transactions) comes first, followed by Uber (3.3 million), Apple (3.1 million), Carrefour (3 million), Tazz (1.6 million), Cluj-Napoca Local Transport Company (1.1 million), eMag (1.1 million), Google (1 million), and McDonald's (960,000).

The study is based on anonymized data, analyzed in aggregated form by the application's analysts for the period January 1 - December 31, 2022, and takes into account exclusively the transactions made by users registered in Romania.

irina.marica@romania-insider.com

(Photo source: Revolut)