Irish Visa cardholders are spending €7.5 billion on their cards a year, new figures from Visa Europe show.

The credit and debit card issuer - which has around 60 per cent of the market here - yesterday released figures showing that for every €10 spent by Irish consumers during the year to the end of September 2005, €1.04 was spent on a Visa card.

The €7.5 billion spend was an increase of 14.9 per cent on the previous year. The number of point of sale Visa transactions increased 7.1 per cent to 63.9 million.

Cardholders spent an average of €4,945 each on their Visa cards at the point of sale, or an average of €106.30 per transaction, as distinct from cash withdrawal. This was significantly above the European average of €58.40.

However, the number of Visa cards in use in Ireland dropped 1 per cent to 2.5 million, compared with a rise of 6.7 per cent to a total of 111 million in Europe as a whole.

Colin Grannell, Visa's European vice-president for UK and Ireland, said that the fall was due to a tranche of Visa ATM cards being replaced over time by debit cards and consumers closing credit card accounts not in regular use to avoid stamp duty.

Visa Europe, which was incorporated in July 2004, generated revenue of €646 million in the 15-month period from July 2004 to September 2005 and posted pretax profits of €89 million.

Its first annual report shows that it has capital reserves of just under €54 million. The company, which is owned and governed by 5,000 European banks, does not give a breakdown of profit and loss figures by country.

Visa Europe forecasts growth of 6 per cent in the number of cards and 12 per cent in cardholder expenditure for 2006. However, Mr Grannell said that he expected the Irish figures to be in excess of this.

Visa will this year begin a new phase of its campaign to replace cash and cheques with electronic payment cards. In the Republic, almost all of its cards are credit cards and the company is in talks with Irish banks about distributing its debit cards.

The discussions are being driven by the need for all debit cards to be compliant with the Single Euro Payments Area (Sepa) by 2008. But Mr Grannell said it was still some 18 months before he expected Visa debit cards would be introduced here.

Total Visa cardholder expenditure in Europe, where it has a 55 per cent share of the card issuing market, increased 19 per cent to €1.09 trillion. At the point of sale, spending by cardholders increased over 15 per cent to €684 billion.