The food retailer Coop Group, which owns 2,200 supermarkets across Hungary and operates a further 3,000 shops through its franchise programme, has set up Coop Hitel Zrt with registered capital of HUF 500m (EUR 1.83m) in order to allow shoppers to use their regular customer cards as credit cards as well in future, the business daily Vilaggazdasag said on Tuesday, quoting company CEO Laszlo Muranyi.

As a wholesaler, Coop serves as a supplier for a further 2,500 independent shops.

The company is also launching a modernisation programme, spending more than HUF 1.5bn on developments over several years. This year, Coop will send HUF 500m on renovating almost 500 shops.

Last year, the group spent HUF 3bn on greenfield investments to set up ten units with an area of 700sqm each.

The shops are supplied from Coop's ten logistic warehouses and an eleventh received imported goods. Coop Hungary and its Czech and Slovak partners set up Coop-Euro AS (Bratislava, Slovakia) ten years ago for international procurement.

The Coop group has its own brand with almost 800 products, which account for almost 20pc of turnover.