Electronic Card Transactions

Series

Title

Electronic Card Transactions

en-NZ
Alternate Title

ECT

en-NZ
Rights

Stats NZ Tatauranga Aotearoa

en-NZ
Abstract

Electronic Card Transactions (ECT) is a monthly series that covers debit, credit, and charge card transactions with New Zealand-based merchants. This information can be used as an indicator of the change in the level of consumption expenditure and economic activity in general.


Statistics NZ would like to acknowledge the cooperation of the private sector in providing the data for publication.

en-NZ
Purpose

The Electronic Card Transactions (ECT) provides timely card spending statistics without significant additional burden on businesses in New Zealand.

en-NZ
Significant events impacting this study series

April 2024 – We updated the seasonal adjustment methodology for ECT by:


  • adopting new Stats NZ standards for extreme additive outliers, See Seasonal adjustment and automatic outliers in time series after COVID-19 for more information.

  • resuming publishing trend series, which were suppressed during the period significantly affected by COVID-19

  • resuming publishing seasonally adjusted series for the Hospitality industry, which was also suppressed during the period significantly affected by COVID-19

  • removing trading day factors for quarterly ECT series to align with international best practice

  • restricting seasonally adjusted and trend series updates to months and quarters from 2017 onwards only. ECT data between October 2002 and December 2016 will not be updated anymore.


January/February 2023 – In late January and mid-February 2023, Aotearoa New Zealand was affected by tropical cyclones Hale and Gabrielle. The adverse weather and resulting flooding caused loss of life, significant damage, and disruption, particularly across the East Coast and upper North Island. Some activity of businesses in affected regions was impacted by the cyclones. However, the ECT data we receive does not include regional breakdowns, and we could not assess the impact on ECT series.


August 2021 – The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on NZ business activity, particularly from 17th to 31st August when COVID-19 alert level 4 was in place for the whole country. Auckland and Northland remained in COVID-19 alert level 4 until September, when only Northland moved to COVID-19 alert level 3. Auckland moved to COVID-19 alert level 3 in September. See History of the COVID-19 Alert System for more information on restrictions and COVID-19 alert changes.


May to September 2020 – COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on NZ business activity, particularly in Auckland which was under alert level from the 12th August until 23rd September. See History of the COVID-19 Alert System for more information on restrictions and COVID-19 alert changes.


March to May 2020 – The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on NZ business activity, particularly from 24th March until 14th May 2020, when COVID-19 alert levels 3 and 4 were in place. See History of the COVID-19 Alert System for more information on restrictions and COVID-19 alert changes.


2019 – A new switch-house was identified and added as a third data provider for the ECT series in 2019, with data being backdated to 2017.


March 2015 - Upgraded the seasonal adjustment package from X-12-ARIMA to X-13-ARIMA-SEATS, to comply with international best practice. Seasonal adjustment aims to eliminate the impact of regular seasonal events (such as annual cycles in agricultural production, winter, or annual holidays) on time series. This makes the data for adjacent months and quarters more comparable. Seasonally adjusted figures can change each month and quarter when new data points are added. This enables the seasonal component to be better estimated and removed from the series.


February 2007 – Statistics NZ decided to publish ECT as a stand-alone data series. The publication of the ECT series commenced in February 2007 with the release of the January 2007 data. Back data were also published with the series commencing in October 2002.


December 2005 - Occasionally, processing outages prevent customers from being able to make transactions at the point of sale. Where these are significant in extent and duration, they can affect the published results for the ECT series. A significant outage occurred in December 2005.


2003-2005 - Statistics New Zealand worked with so-called switch houses, to arrange the regular supply of data. The switch houses have been supplying aggregated data on a monthly basis since 2004. In July 2005 Statistics NZ funded a project to investigate potential statistical uses of the data.


1999-2003 –The potential uses of electronic card transactions, more commonly known as eftpos, were first investigated by Statistics New Zealand in 1999 and this analysis was later updated in 2001. These investigations demonstrated that electronic card transactions could have potential to be a very timely leading indicator of retail spending. During the 1990s the uptake of the eftpos technology by merchants and consumers grew at a rapid rate.

Usage and limitations of the data

Electronic Card Transactions provide timely information on debit and credit card spending with New Zealand based merchants, which may provide information on consumer spending and economic activity in general.


Limitations of the data:
  1. At present, only one respondent is separating out cashout from its transaction values.

  2. We are unable to validate the coverage of the classifications for particular industries as we don’t know which merchants are included in each industry. This could have implications for any breakdown of the data based on industry classification.

  3. Transactions that the data providers cannot categorise are not included in the ECT results.


Differences between the Electronic Card Transactions (ECT) series and the Retail Trade Survey (RTS):


A significant proportion of spending using debit and credit cards takes place in the retail sector. The Retail Trade Survey (RTS) also collects sales information about the retail sector from retail establishments. Given the similarities in coverage of the two series, it is expected they may be comparable. However, users should be aware that there are a number of differences between the two series that affect comparison between them.

These differences are described here


The results indicate the following:

  • Movements in the actual (unadjusted) values of electronic card transactions provide a good indication of the direction of the RTS actuals, as the two series usually move in the same direction.

  • Movements in ECT actuals are frequently different in magnitude compared with movements in RTS actuals.

  • The differences found in the actuals data flow through to comparisons of the ECT and RTS seasonally adjusted series, which can differ in the direction and size of the movement.


These differences have generally been outside the acceptable tolerances indicated by users for the use of the ECT series as a predictor of movements in the RTS.

Given these differences, we do not recommend using the ECT series as an indicator or predictor of the RTS series.

Main users of the data

EXTERNAL: Electronic Card Transactions (ECT) provides information to Reserve Bank, The Treasury, Retail Merchants Association, Businesses, The Media, Economic Agencies (NZIER, Berl, Trading Banks), other government departments and industry associations.

INTERNAL: Business Indicators, National Accounts Division.

Frequency

Monthly

Related Documentation

Electronic Card Transactions – information releases

en-NZ

Studies

Coverage

Date
-

Extra Metadata

Appears Within

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Information

History

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Revision Date Responsibility Rationale
97 14/05/2024 10:44:30 AM
75 30/11/2021 3:36:50 PM