Off the wire
• UN chief urges more efforts towards final peace deal in South Sudan  • Central bank revises up Ireland's 2015 GDP growth forecast  • 1st LD: Obama pledges to defeat IS as new video on Jordanian hostage emerges  • Spanish Banco Santander makes 5.816-bln-euro profit in 2014  • 3rd LD: Jordan gov't confirms killing of pilot by IS, army vows to revenge  • Benzema set to lead as Bale aims to please  • Urgent: Obama pledges to defeat IS as new video on Jordanian hostage emerges  • Portugal's Algarve region register record overnight stays  • Botswana's 2015 GDP growth forecast at 4.9 pct: official  • Peace building main task for neighboring countries: Croatian politicians  
You are here: 　 Home

Russia's payment system starts MasterCard transaction operation

Xinhua, February 4, 2015 Adjust font size:

Russia's National System of Payment Cards (NSPC) has started to process transactions of MasterCard payment in five Russian banks, the Central Bank said Tuesday.

"Starting from Jan. 30 of 2015, the first five banks ( Gazprombank, Bank Rossiya, SMP Bank, Aleksandrovsky Bank and MDM Bank) have started transaction services of MasterCard's Russian customers using the NSPC processing center," the Central Bank said in a statement.

The NSPC's processing infrastructure, communication channels and operational services "have shown their readiness for planned development of full-fledged and full-scale interaction with market participants," Tass news agency quoted head of the NSPC Vladimir Komlev as saying.

The NSPC has been created as a response to the U.S. sanctions, which in 2014 barred the MasterCard and Visa payment systems from servicing their clients in Russia. NSPC is planning to start issuing its own plastic cards by December.

The law amendment enforced last July requires all international payment cards on Russian territories to switch transactions to the NSPC processing center or to pay a hefty "security deposit" to the Central Bank in order to stay in the Russian market.

Visa last November argued that the law requirements would effectively squeeze it out of Russia, while MasterCard has agreed in mid-January to transfer the processing of its transactions within Russia to the NSPC.

Both payment systems, however, have stopped servicing the transaction in the Crimean peninsula to comply with the demands of the U.S. authorities.

The U.S.-based Visa and MasterCard have issued 175 million cards for their Russian customers, accounting for 80 percent of all banking cards in Russia. Endite