Eurozone transactions in 2011 : €1,192 trillion

Every month the European Central Bank publishes a "Statistics Pocket Book" full of interesting data about the Eurozone. The october edition, which came out on the 11th of October, includes figures for Payments and Transactions in 2011.

Table 10 (on paged 35-6) gives information about "Payment and Settlement Systems". These are broken down into "Transactions involing non-MFIs by type of payment instrument" (Credit transfers, Direct Debits, Card payments, E-money purchases, Cheques, and Other Payment Instruments) which are detailed in table 10.1 and "Payments processed by selected interbank funds transfer systems" (Table 10.2).

I've compiled the numbers together in the following table which shows that the total transactions in 2011 reached an impressive total of €1,192 trillion, up over 8% on 2010. The Eurozone is clearly booming, although you wouldn't know it when you look at all the austerity that is being imposed. 

If you want to know where these transactions are taking place, you can go to the ECB's website where the figures in table 10.1 are broken down by country. Here they are.

As you can see, a substantial proportion of the €143.7 trillion transactions using the various payment mechanisms were based in Germany (nearly €68 trillion), but France managed a respectable €28.4 trillion too.

It seems to me that there is really plenty of scope here for generating large amounts of revenue using a Eurozone based FTT. I really can't understand why the revenue levels that we hear about are so small. For me, 0.1% on €1,192 trillion is over a trillion euros. You could do a lot with that.