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In Russia, they seriously wanted to create a competitor to Visa and MasterCard. The end result is such a large-scale project that it is unlikely to be realized.

This is a legend, but the market is still telling how at the end of 2003, after Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested, FSB officers came to the Russian representative office of Visa to check what purchases the head of Yukos made with his plastic card. Suddenly this knowledge would be useful to them. At the Visa office, the FSB officers were told that they knew little about these operations - neither what the client bought, nor where it could be said. Allegedly, Visa only knows between which banks the transaction was made and its number, the so-called authorization code.

If Russia has its own national payment system, it will be easier for the FSB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the tax authorities to work. On behalf of Dmitry Medvedev, the draft law "On the National Payment System" should be introduced this week. If it is adopted in its current form - and this is quite likely - Visa and MasterCard will transfer the operation of their Russian cards from abroad to the territory of Russia.

The thought of the ideologues of the national payment system did not stop there. A national competitor to both Visa and MasterCard will appear in the country. Every citizen of the country will receive a plastic card. With its help, it will be possible to pay for purchases, withdraw cash, enter into financial relations with the state - pay taxes and fines, receive benefits, and so on. But that's not all. This card will contain the personal data of its owner: passport number, TIN, registration address and everything else. The state and its citizens will be able to get in touch.

MARKET CONQUER

Many have probably noticed that cheap stores, such as Auchan and Magnit hypermarkets, do not accept plastic cards at all. And payment terminals most often take payment in cash. They just don't want to pay fees to payment systems.

When you pay with a card in a store, the money from your account at the issuing bank that issued the card to you goes to the account of the bank that has installed a terminal for accepting cards in this store. This bank is called the acquiring bank. International systems obligated the acquirer to pay a commission to the issuer - 0.8–1.2% of the amount of each transaction. This is called an interchange fee. Then the acquirer transfers the paid amount to the store's account, having previously deducted the due commission. It is 2–2.5%.

Both Visa and MasterCard shape the fee structure where they operate. The commissions introduced in Russia stimulate the issuance of more and more new cards. As a result, 120 million cards have already been issued in our country, 85% of which are accounted for by these two systems.

All over the world, cards are used to pay for purchases and services. In Russia, more than 80% of transactions are cash withdrawals from ATMs. Not only because the financial culture in Russia is still low, but also because the same Auchan and Magnit still do not accept cards. Bankers complain: it's all the fault of the tariffs set by Visa and MasterCard.

It is unprofitable for cheap shops to accept cards. Their operating margin is resale income minus wages, rent, and so on. - is about 5% of the turnover. When accepting cards, you will have to give the same 2–2.5% to the acquiring bank. The same problem with payment terminals: they have a profitability of 1.5% for accepting cash.

Where cards are accepted, the acquirer and issuer earn, roughly speaking, a percentage of each transaction. For the issuer, these revenues are cheaper: the cost of issuing a card is $3 plus service. Connecting a point of sale to the payment system is the work of an acquirer - it costs about $1,000 plus maintenance. Bankers are more likely to choose the first path. They issue more and more new cards. Look in your wallet - you probably have two or three of them there. And even more. This is a consequence of the interchange fee: keeping it at a high level, Visa and MasterCard captured the Russian market.

SPECIAL PATH

How to protect yourself from international networks, which ultimately determine the principles for the development of entire sectors of the financial market? Create a National Payments Space (NPP) - let card payments be serviced domestically. Some non-profit partnership will do this, not an international payment system. Accordingly, the interchange fee and other tariffs will not be set by her. On this territory, the function of settlements will be withdrawn from it, in fact - nationalized.

Then the share of non-cash payments will increase - roughly speaking, Auchan will start accepting cards. The Ministry of Internal Affairs often said that this is a way to fight corruption. Russia is not the first country where an NPP will be created. These are already operating in Kazakhstan and South Africa.

Technically, this is not difficult. It is enough to install a router that will directly connect the acquiring bank with the issuing bank. Today, the acquiring bank authorizes the purchase as follows: it sends a request whether the cardholder has enough money to the Belgian city of Waterloo (MasterCard) or London (Visa). In NPP, this connection will be organized through Moscow. It will be necessary to build a computer center the size of a Metro store worth hundreds of millions of dollars, says a Visa employee. There is no need for this, there are already several centers that are technically ready, Oleg Tishakov, chairman of the board of the United Settlement System, retorts.

Then Visa and MasterCard will no longer be able to guarantee that the store or restaurant will receive money from the acquiring bank on a card with their logo - they have not received any requests in London and Waterloo and they do not know if this money is on the card or not. Therefore, together with the router, a national clearing (settlement) center will also have to be created: there is no technical problem here, such a center exists, for example, at the MICEX exchange. This system - the router and the clearing house - constitutes the NPP.

From the NPP to the national payment system (NPS), one step is to simply start issuing cards under your own brand. So they did in China - China Unionpay appeared there. The obvious problem with such cards is that they are not accepted abroad. The way out is in co-branding: there are two logos on the map, an NPS works inside the country, and an international one outside it. For example, in the 1990s, MasterCard agreed to co-brand in Russia even with small local payment systems - such were being built then - and Visa flatly refused such projects, says one of the market participants.

QUESTION PRICE

Last fall, Prime Minister Putin gave the command to develop a draft law "On the National Payment System" by the end of the year. The participants in the process say that the working group included representatives of all special services. In the last couple of months, the working group has met almost every day, and the bill has been rewritten ten times. The first versions were tough, says one of the participants. For example, there was talk of obliging banks and retail outlets to re-equip their infrastructure to accept new cards within a year.

Opponents of this approach explained that as a result, banks would incur monstrous costs. There are 250,000 stores in the country that accept cards, and each terminal will cost $800–900; the cost of the entire infrastructure for reception at retail outlets can be estimated at $ 200 million, and it will have to be created anew. Plus the cost of adapting ATMs, bank kiosks, etc.

Supporters objected: Russia has a modern infrastructure for accepting cards and will not have to be changed. Card payments began to develop rapidly only in 2008, confirms Ilya Belanovsky, executive director of the Association of Retail Companies. A new firmware will be enough - $ 7.5-10 million for the re-equipment of all stores. And the total price of the issue is $20–40 million.

The security forces were for a tough approach. In Russia, all work related to the encryption of information is carried out by structures associated with the FSB. They would most likely have received an order to flash the terminals. The bankers were still against it: the president of the Association of Russian Banks, Garegin Tosunyan, said that he would not allow such changes. He was supported by the head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service Igor Artemyev.

As a result, the latest version of the bill no longer obliges banks and retail outlets to service the new card. The issue of $40 million for refurbishment lost its relevance - larger sums were already at stake.

UNIFIED BASE

On December 23, Dmitry Medvedev, at a meeting of the State Council, proposed creating a national payment system and organizing the issuance of social cards to all Russian citizens on its basis. Then the head of VEB, Vladimir Dmitriev, took the podium. He said that his bank is ready to take over this project and implement it within a year. The bankers realized that the NPS is something like a new national project and they will not spare money for it. It was clear that we were talking about billions of dollars.

The social card that Dmitry Medvedev spoke about is not at all a plastic card for students and pensioners. This is an electronic analogue of a passport, where all the essential information about the owner is recorded on the chip, everything that the state needs to process any documents. Instead of a pack of photocopies and powers of attorney - a card with a chip.

Such cards will need to be issued 120 million pieces immediately and then some more annually. Market participants estimate the cost of one card - taking into account the volume and issue and the fact that the budget will pay - at $3 per card. To do them, obviously, will be structures close to the FSB. That is, we were already talking about an amount of about $360 million, which is an order of magnitude more than the money that would have gone to re-equip the terminals. Card readers - each costing $10 to $20 - will have to be provided to hundreds of thousands of public institutions, says one banker.

But all this is purely financial problems. It will be much more difficult to unify the databases of departments and ensure the exchange of information between them, says Sergey Moiseev, director of the Center for Economic Research at the Moscow Financial and Industrial Academy. Today, even the traffic police do not have a single base, the Pension Fund has different accounting systems in different regions, etc.

ELECTRONIC RUSSIA

On February 3, Vladimir Matyukhin, head of the Federal Agency for Information Technologies (FAIT), resigned. Formally - because he will be 65 years old. But in fact - because of the failure of the Federal Target Program "Electronic Russia". It was supposed, in particular, to ensure the flow of documents between different departments.

Matyukhin is considered one of the ideologists of Electronic Russia, a source in the industry says. It turned out that neither he, nor FAIT, nor the Ministry of Communications, to which it reports, lacks the hardware weight to force real work to unify databases, for example, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Now FAIT is likely to be eliminated. The market believes that the general contractor for the formation of a new base will be a structure close to VEB.

The social card - if it ever appears, of course - will also have a financial function: with its help, citizens will receive benefits, pensions, and will be able to pay taxes and fines. And just pay with it in shops and cafes. This idea is attributed to the Ministry of Economic Development. “They are there, in the Ministry of Economic Development, great inventors: they are trying to combine a cat with a dog,” the employee of the Ministry of Finance laughs.

For the idea to work, ATMs will need to be installed throughout the country - otherwise, having received a pension in a remote area, the grandmother will not be able to cash it out. VEB promises to create such a structure on the basis of Svyaz-bank and Russian Post. The bank has all the necessary licenses and technologies, and the post office has 44,000 branches, twice as many as Sberbank. But turning post offices into banking ones is also a whole story: to improve communication, supply equipment, train people, create a centralized management system for such a structure.

One of the bankers estimates the overall scope of the project: at least $10 billion and at least five years of work. The government has no goals to make money on this project, says a source in the White House. The head of VEB, Vladimir Dmitriev, promised to present the concept of a social card based on the national payment system in a month.

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