Moscow - The National Payment Card System (NPCS) will begin promoting its cards abroad in 2016, the deputy head of the Central Bank of Russia's national payment system department Ramilya Kanafina said at an expanded meeting of the Eurasian business council on Dec. 12.
The NPCS strategy envisions three stages: creation of an operational payment
clearing center to process intra-Russian transactions using the cards of
international systems (target date – Q1 2015), issuance of NPCS cards (December
2015) and expansion of the card onto the international market, Kanafina
said.
NPCS may begin realizing the third stage of the strategy in early 2016.
“Clearly, we will rely on the EEU [Eurasian Economic Union] member countries
first of all, led by Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia,” she said.
Cooperation will be organized with other countries and their national systems
“with the goal of launching integration mechanisms.” One of the initiatives is
“to examine opportunities to organize intra-country clearing and settlements on
operations with cards of the national payment systems of the individual
countries,” she said.
In November, Central Bank Deputy Governor Olga Skorobogatova said the bank
would work with its Belarusian and Kazakh counterparts on integrating the
payment systems of the three countries. “What we want to achieve is certain
infrastructural elements that will allow our platforms be integrated and create
a unified environment that will allow for transactions to be carried out. For
example, a co-brand card with a Kazakh bank or with the Belarusian BelCard
service. We will have a more concrete understanding of these areas in a quarter,
that is, in early 2015,” Skorobogatova said.
Following the imposition of U.S. sanctions against Russia last spring, the
Visa and MasterCard payment systems stopped servicing transactions on cards
issued by a number of Russian banks. Soon after, Russia enacted a law on
creation of a national payment card system and required that systems without the
nationally significant designation shift their processing for Russian
transactions to the Russian clearing center or make a security deposit to the
Central Bank calculated from their daily average turnover in Russia. The
national payment card system is planning to create a clearing center to process
intra-Russian transactions in the first quarter of 2015 and begin issuing its
own cards in December 2015.
