The Central Bank of Russia is preparing a replacement for Apple Pay and Google Pay

In March of this year, Russians lost the ability to pay for purchases in offline stores using NFC in

smartphone due to Apple Pay services leaving the marketand Google Pay. The only option left is "Mir Pay", but it only works with "Mir" cards, which account for only 27% of all payment transactions in the country. The majority of people continue to use physical Visa and MasterCard cards. In this regard, at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF-2022), the Central Bank of the Russian Federation discussed with banks the creation of a universal payment application for smartphones, to which it will be possible to link Visa, Mastercard and other international payment systems issued by Russian banks.

One of the options is the system“SBPay”, which is proposed to be finalized. However, it was not initially intended to work with cards, but is aimed at transfers from individual accounts to legal entity accounts. At the same time, this option has a number of tangible disadvantages: not all banks have implemented work with SBPay, and payment terminals are not adapted to accept payments from SBPay. But an even more unpleasant moment in such unification will be the fact that banks ” will stop competing with their own interfaces and will lose the motivation to create more “smart” payment applications”, which means their customers will suffer as a result. Finally, “SBPay” remains the only payment system that works on Apple devices, which means there is a risk that it will be blocked for intending to add Visa and Mastercard cards from Russia.

© Vladimir Kovalev.

According to kommersant.ru