Boxing Day sales in Australia have caused a big spike in plastic card use, with one bank reporting a 30% jump in transactions on last year.
The National Australia Bank reported on Thursday it put through 3,839,518 debit and credit card, ATM and EFTPOS transactions, with a peak transaction rate of 100 per second.
A spokesman said that was an increase of about 30% from last year's Boxing Day, when just under three million transactions were processed at a peak transaction rate of 80 a second.
Thursday 20 December was the busiest day on the NAB network with the bank processing 7,728,359 transactions at a peak rate of 181.76 per second.
But Christmas Eve saw volumes peak at 206.58 per second - the highest peak transactions rate ever recorded by the bank for the Christmas period.
The bank processed a total of 6,974,766 transactions on 24 December.
