Visa and MasterCard users in Crimea are still at risk
Genbank was the first to announce the start of accepting Visa and MasterCard cards in Crimea. Until now, Russian players have tried not to advertise such actions, which are subject to US sanctions. However, experts "Kommersant" indicate that GenBank’s actions jeopardize the entire card business of large Russian sponsor banks. Especially when Visa and MasterCard chip cards are used in Crimea - in this case, the Americans will quickly detect a violation of the sanctions regime and can block them.
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Accepting Visa and MasterCard from any Russian banks in Crimea, where American companies have been barred from operating since December 2014, has so far been difficult due to the threat of sanctions. And if Genbank acted in Crimea as an acquiring bank for Visa and MasterCard, this could lead to sanctions against Rosbank as a sponsor of Genbank.
Rosbank confirmed that it has blocked transactions using Visa and MasterCard cards in Crimea.
But, as stated in GenBank, the new scheme for working with cards through the National System of Payment Cards (NSCP) does not threaten Rosbank in any way and there is no longer any need to obtain its approval.
According to the same scheme, MasterCard cards and some Visa cards are accepted, the processing of which has already been transferred to the NSPK, and to the sanctioned RNCB, the newspaper writes.
However, this scheme is not flawless and creates risks both for the acquiring banks themselves, which are not subject to sanctions, and for the card issuing banks, experts say. “When a chip card enters the terminal, special keys provided to the acquiring bank by the payment system itself are used to read information from it,” says the newspaper’s interlocutor in the payment market. “If the bank, being an acquirer of another payment system, in this case NSPK, uses these keys, he violates the terms of the agreement with the Ministry of Railways, and in theory, the Ministry of Railways can apply sanctions to him by terminating his membership in its system - then the bank will not be able to issue its cards at all, even in the rest of the Russian Federation.” However, the decoding of the information can be delegated to the issuing bank, but in this case the Ministry of Railways may have questions for the issuer. In such a situation, a number of issuing banks, in order to avoid such a risk, can simply block the ability to accept cards issued by them in Crimea, which some of them have already done, the publication’s interlocutor notes, refusing to name specific players.
GenBank acknowledges this risk and emphasizes that each Russian bank will decide for itself whether to operate in Crimea.
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