Debit cards more popular than cash

Debit cards have overtaken cash to become the UK's most popular payment method for the first time, figures showed yesterday. On 30 August the amount of money people had spent on debit cards since the beginning of the year overtook the value of transactions paid for in cash for the first time at £272bn-, compared with £269bn for cash, according to the Payments Council.

The value of purchases made using debit cards rose by 10 per cent during the third quarter of the year, compared with a year earlier, to £73.1bn, with 1.6 million additional daily transactions.