Americans increasingly relied on credit cards to make payments in 2016, and made more of those payments remotely, according to new data the Federal Reserve released yesterday, Dow Jones Newswires reported. The number of credit-card payments grew 10.2 percent last year, to 37.3 billion, compared with an annual growth rate of 8.1 percent over the previous three years. The Fed attributed the increase in part to “continued strong growth” in the number of remote payments, such as online shopping and bill paying, which represented 22.2 percent of all general-purpose credit- and debit-card payments. Remote payments increased 1.5 percent from 2015, the Fed said. By value, remote payments represented 44 percent of all general-purpose card payments.
