RBC.Rating reports SKB-Bank has issued the greatest number of cards so far among all the mid-Urals’ banks. The figure reached 480,000 on July 1, 2008.

RBC.Rating’s data indicate that most cards are normally issued by Russia’s largest banks within the framework of salary schemes. Most of them are either VISA (49%) or MasterCard (35%) ones.

SKB-Bank is nearly at the top of Russia’s Top 30 Banks list in terms of the bank card growth dynamics, as the increase in the number of cards issued by the bank over last year came to more than 33%.

The agency’s analysts believe the bank card market will keep developing quite rapidly, with the ever-increasing share of cards issued to accompany one’s consumer loan. With the necessary non-cash transactions infrastructure improvements, credit cards might actually replace the classic loan types altogether, they say.

The Bank of Russia reports 111 million bank cards have been issued by Russian banks by now, which is a lot more than the number of working-age Russian citizens at the moment. The number of cards went up by 20 million over last year alone.