OREANDA-NEWS. Sberbank's active bank card portfolio reached 117.9m in 2015. The indicator increased by 15.7% (nearly 16m cards) during the year, while the average monthly card turnover increased by 23.5%, Rostislav Yanykin, Director of the Bank Card and Cash Services Department at Sberbank said at a press conference.

At the end of 2015 the number of Sberbank's debit cards exceeded 102m (an increase of over 17%), the number of credit cards was 15.6m (an increase of 7.3%).

In Q4 2015 Sberbank launched a new service called "Piggy Bank" across Russia. The services allows to perform automatic transfers from debit cards accounts to savings accounts or recurring deposits and has now been used by 100,000 clients. In Q3 Sberbank began issuing cards with personized designs. Applications for personalized cards can be submitted on the bank's web-page and photos can be uploaded from Instagram. Sberbank has already issued over 113,000 cards with personalized designs.

In 2015, a new offer for payroll clients was introduced: a card with an inbuilt contactless NFC application for one-touch payments, which can be used as a ticket, an office or university pass. Sberbank has already issued 300,000 cards of this type, the speaker said.

"This year Sberbank continued to improve its bank card offers, develop remote service channels and grow the acquiring infrastructure. This helped the volume of non-cash transactions on Sberbank cards reach 50%, while the share of cash withdrawals declined by 8%", Rostislav noted, "We see that less people are currently using cards solely for cash withdrawals. This means that clients trust Sberbank more and positively assess our efforts to improve our products and services."