Russian banks will be able to add MIR cards to the Apple Pay contactless payment service by the end of this month. This was announced by Viktor Dostov, head of the Association of Electronic Money and Money Transfer Market Participants, Izvestia reports. He noted that banks will be able to connect Mir cards at their own discretion, so there is a possibility that not all financial institutions will realize this opportunity.
Dostov believes that this is a huge advantage for any payment system. Today, MIR cardholders are forced to transfer money to cards of other international systems in order to use Apple Pay. With their addition, they will not differ from Visa and MasterCard. The only thing that remains unclear is the availability of Russian cards in the contactless payment service on the territory of Crimea.
Now Mir can only be connected to Samsung Pay and Mir Pay services, which work on Android devices with NFC. The lack of support for the domestic system in Apple Pay made it uncompetitive. Earlier this month, the network began to talk about the fact that the use of Visa and MasterCard systems in Russia may be limited.
The national system of payment cards “Mir” was created in 2014 after several Russian banks came under US sanctions, and Visa and MasterCard stopped serving cards issued by them.
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