Cashless Payment Card Usage in Ukraine Before and During the Full-Scale War, 2019-2025
Description
This dataset tracks the share of cashless (non-cash) transactions in the total value and total number of payment card transactions in Ukraine, from the pre-war baseline year of 2019 through the first quarter of 2025. The dataset is intended to support research on the relationship between banking sector digitalization and operational resilience during crises. Ukraine's cashless payment share was already high before the full-scale war (61.0% by value, 90.1% by count in 2021) and continued rising through the war (65.2% by value, 95.2% by count by Q1 2025). This dataset provides the empirical basis for the hypothesis, discussed in this author's companion conference paper and journal article, that pre-existing high digital payment penetration may have helped Ukraine's banking system continue operating without a sudden operational collapse when physical branch access was disrupted in combat-affected areas, consistent with broader literature linking bank digitalization to financial system resilience (Ozili, 2018; and subsequent empirical studies). IMPORTANT DATA COVERAGE CAUTION: unlike this author's other datasets in this series, the periods covered here are NOT uniform. The NBU publishes cashless payment statistics irregularly (some releases cover a full calendar year, one covers only May-December 2022, and the two most recent data points available to the author at compilation time were Q1-only figures for 2024 and 2025). Each row's Period and Period_Type columns specify exactly what period it covers; this dataset should not be treated as a clean annual or quarterly time series, and readers should not linearly interpolate between rows of different types. The author was unable to locate a single official release giving a clean full-year 2024 figure or a Q1 2022 (pre-invasion) figure at the time of compilation; researchers needing more complete coverage should consult the NBU's quarterly payment card market releases directly (see source below), which are published as narrative reports rather than a downloadable structured dataset. METHODOLOGY & SOURCES Data were manually compiled from a series of individual National Bank of Ukraine press releases and payment card market reports, each covering a different period as noted above. No calculations were made; figures are reproduced as published in each respective release. CONTACT INFORMATION Illia Kyselov, PhD in Law Associate Professor, Department of Law, Bohdan Khmelnytsky Melitopol State Pedagogical University, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine CMSA (R), FPWMP (R), and BIDA (R) (Corporate Finance Institute) Email: illiakyselov86@gmail.com The author is open to collaboration on Scopus-indexed publications and further research using Ukrainian economic and financial statistics. Inquiries regarding this dataset, potential co-authorship, or data requests are welcome.