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MasterCard Desires to Move Forward with Payments in Russia

July 3, 2024         By: Brad Rickerby

MasterCard has again indicated its desire to continue working on the development of electronic payments in Russia.

Earlier this year, the United States government placed sanctions on several Russian banks as a result of the crisis in Ukraine.

This put credit card giant MasterCard in a difficult position, leading MasterCard to question its ability to work in Russia going forward. The US sanctions brought forth critical responses from the Russian banks, including the introduction and passage of punitive legislation directed against both MasterCard and Visa.

That legislation was scheduled to go into effect July 1, 2014.

MasterCard announced yesterday that it wants to continue to work with Russia to build their electronics payment system.

In a release, MasterCard said that, “when the road ahead looks difficult it is time to re-evaluate the route being traveled and in many ways that is what MasterCard has been doing in Russia over the last couple of months.” The release continues that MasterCard does “share the Russian government’s goal of moving more transactions from cash to electronic payments, but not at all costs.”

In their statement, MasterCard also announced the delay in the introduction of a security deposit and that they have fielded a Request For Proposal (RFP) for processing partners to which 20 Russian companies have responded.

Currently, Russia accounts for just over 2% of MasterCard’s net revenues worldwide, with $167 million in transactions. Eighty percent of Russia’s transactions are in cash, so there is substantial room for growth in Russian electronic payments and the fees they would generate to MasterCard’s bottom line.

There are 100 million MasterCard holders in Russia.