The statistic comes from the European Central Bank's study on Cash Use by Household in the Euro Area, published in November 2017.
The report presents estimations of the number and value of cash transactions in all 19 euro area countries in 2016, based on survey result as well as figures on main payments by demographic.
According to the findings from the European Central Bank's report, cash was used for 54% of point-of-sale payments across the euro area in terms of value of transactions (ECB, 2017).
"In terms of number of transactions, 78.8% of purchases at the POS were paid using cash, 19.1% using cards and the remaining 2.1% was paid using various other payment instruments (see Chart 1). In terms of value, cash payments accounted for 53.8% of all POS payments, cards for 39% and other means of payment accounted for the remaining 7.2%." (p. 18)
