Cashback, goodbye to the first and special state up

The state cashback will not return in 2022; The Cabinet chose to allocate resources to other spending items. However, as the analysis of Facile.it shows, the initiative seems to attract consumers and has made a significant contribution to bringing Italians closer to electronic money: examining a sample of 50,000 orders, the comparison found, in the first half of 2021, a 39% increase in the number of card searches Prepaid, with significant growth especially in the consumer segment up to the age of 34.

The data from Facile.it is enhanced by those that show how the number of digital payments in the first half of 2021 grew by 41% to 3.2 billion, for a total of more than 145 billion euros, with an average receipt, also thanks to cashback, by more than 11% to reach € 45.7 (Innovative Payments Observatory, School of Management at Politecnico di Milano).

Many have criticized the effectiveness of cashbacks in combating tax evasion, which is one of the reasons why the previous government introduced the mechanism. It was certainly not a priority for Italians; Already in 2019, Facile.it highlighted, through a survey entrusted to the mUp Research Institute, that among the 22.4 million citizens unwilling to part with cash, nearly 6 out of 10 respondents would have given up only in Facing some form of reimbursement such as cashback, while less than 1 in 3 have done so to contribute to the fight against tax evasion.

However, the cashback formula is not adamant about fading out, and in fact, precisely after the success of the state initiative, many credit institutions realized its potential and made it their own.

“As long as – explains Ivano Cristo, Managing Director of Financial Products of Facile.it – ​​the state initiative has been in place, some credit institutions have integrated the official state cashback application into home banking, helping their clients to participate in the initiative; now that The state cashback is no longer valid, some banks have chosen to propose their own cashback mechanism, with the aim of continuing to encourage customers to use electronic payments.”

The mechanism promoted by credit institutions and mentioned by Cresto usually provides for a refund of a variable amount for a payment made with an electronic card. The percentage varies from bank to bank; In some cases, an initial cashback of 10% is generally recognized, which then tends to decrease over time to 1%, while in others a fixed amount is repaid for each transaction that takes place.