UrBC, Yekaterinburg, July 22, 2019. Coffee houses, deli stores, and fast food restaurants are the businesses in the catering segment where the demand for banks’ acquiring services is the highest, the Ural Bank for Reconstruction & Development’s analysts say after looking into their customer base for the first half of 2019.

According to the UBRD’s data, the share of companies in the said segment came to 7.2% of all customers signing acquiring contracts as of July 1, 2019. In 2017, their share only came to 5.5%.

‘Coffee-to-go and street food venues, as well as fast food cafes, are now very popular and growing fast, unlike other types of cafes and restaurants. A business owner normally gets all the payment infrastructure ready as soon as the new place opens, since increasingly more customers prefer to pay by cards. A card payment terminal even at a very small venue is now the indispensable hygienic/customer service prerequisite,’ says UBRD Corporates Development Director Elena Sorvina.

Sorvina says these are not only the shops and cafes in large cities that are signing up for acquiring services; these are also businesses in the seaside resort towns, where the tertiary sector flourishes. For one, the share of companies based in Krasnodar Territory now comes to 9% of the bank’s acquiring database, which is the second largest percentage after the share of Sverdlovsk Region-based ones. Now Sverdlovsk Region is the UBRD’s home constituency, so the current share of local clients with acquiring contracts comes to as much as 32% of the entire acquiring database.