Half a million bank accounts wound up since transaction tax introduced

Budapest, March 23 (MTI) – Over 520,000 retail bank accounts have been wound up since the introduction of the transaction tax in 2013, business daily Világgazdaság reported on Wednesday.

Citing National Bank of Hungary data, the paper said that there were 9.32 million private individual bank accounts at the end of last year, the lowest number since the bank started tracking this kind of data in 2010. The number of accounts peaked in 2012 and has declined in every quarter since, the paper said. Besides the higher banking costs associated with the transactions tax, fewer people are keeping their savings in banks due to the low rate of deposits. Further, fewer have parallel bank accounts, it added.

At the same time, more and more transactions are taking place on the internet and via mobile phones. Private individuals and company clients conducted almost 100 million transactions worth 37,000 billion forints this way last year. Direct debit is getting increasingly popular and there are a growing number of people who use bank cards, the paper added.

Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters