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Growth in Eftpos transactions has slowed, another sign the economy may be losing momentum.
Eftpos operator Paymark has processed its six billionth electronic payment over the 18-year-old network, and about two million Eftpos payments are made every day.
But while the total number of card transactions in July was up more than 9.4 per cent on the previous year, at 60.8 million, Paymark chief executive Simon Tong said transaction growth had slowed, which may indicate a general economic slowdown.
"The average value of Eftpos transactions has also fallen, suggesting people are using Eftpos cards to make smaller payments," Tong said.
Paymark is responsible for about three-quarters of the Eftpos transactions completed in the country at more than 80,000 Eftpos terminals.
Tong said the Paymark network was reliable, with only four major Eftpos outages in the company's history.
"There's a lot of other things between the merchant and us, like connections into stores, that can go wrong," he said.
A loss of service two days before Christmas 2005 left last-minute shoppers unable to pay for their trolley loads of goods, attracting howls of outrage from retailers.
Tong, who joined Paymark after the outage, said it was a common misconception the network had been overloaded in the Christmas rush.
"The network was running at 30 per cent capacity at the time, so it had nothing to do with that," he said.
"It was a hardware and software failure that led to an overhaul of systems."
Paymark anticipated strong future growth in Eftpos use, especially as online retailers started to process more trans- actions and more mobile Eftpos services were offered.
Tong said online sales still accounted for less than 5 per cent of transactions.
