Christmas and New Year’s sales brought good tidings for retailers. New Zealanders spent an extra $397 million over December compared with the previous year, reveal figures from Paymark, which processes 75% of New Zealand’s electronic transactions.
Paymark CEO Mark Rushworth says Christmas 2015 set a new record for the number of transactions per second the Paymark network has ever processed, with a peak of 157.46 transactions per second. “Each year Christmas Eve really gives us a good workout. Throughout the year we typically see 50 to 60 transactions per second and during December we saw that average figure creep up into the 115 – 120 range, but this is a new record for us.”
In terms of dollars spent, Paymark processed $147,772,818.15 from midnight to 1pm on Christmas Eve. At its peak, Paymark handled more than half a million transactions an hour.
Paymark pointed to a number of factors behind the overall increase in spending, including the Reserve Bank cutting the OCR, which flows on to lower mortgage rates, as well as continued GDP growth.
Spending growth for the entire country was up almost 8% to $5.493 billion compared with December 2014 – with the Bay of Plenty (10.1%), Auckland and Northland (9.2%), and Marlborough (9.9%) among the regions seeing the biggest growth.
The number of transactions across the country was also up by 8.2% year on year. December saw 106.05 million transactions conducted on the Paymark network.
