Bankers try on rings and bracelets – Newspaper Kommersant No. 11 (7456) of 01/23/2023

This week, a new payment instrument is entering the Russian market — a sticker that can be stuck on a smartphone. The banks, which announced it in December, are talking about strong demand and expect to sell millions of devices this year. But experts believe that interest in stickers, as well as rings and bracelets with the same functionality, which appeared against the backdrop of the departure of foreign payment services, will not last long.

In the near future, several large banks are going to offer payment stickers to customers. Alfa-Bank plans to do this on January 23, MKB – “within a couple of weeks.” Testing of this payment form factor is also being discussed at Sberbank, VTB, and Post Bank. Tinkoff-Bank was the first to announce its intention to introduce a new tool in mid-December 2022, but until recently it was still conducting testing with the participation of employees.

NFC (Near Field Communication) payment stickers allow you to make contactless payments using your smartphone.

The NFC module is a small flat coil with a miniature chip and an antenna, the signal from which is received by the smartphone. The principle of its operation is based on electromagnetic induction, and the connection itself has a very small radius of action. To pay for the purchase with a payment sticker, you need to bring the smartphone on which it is pasted to the terminal.

According to the head of Tinkoff Kassa, Sergey Khromov, the demand for stickers is predetermined by the fact that customers will be able to return to the usual method of contactless payment with a smartphone. “This is especially true for iPhone users, since at the moment there are no analogues of blocked ApplePay in the Russian Federation,” he explains. “It’s safe – you can set up a PIN code on the sticker or block it in case of loss,” Alfa-Bank assured.

Several payment card companies confirmed to Kommersant that they are seeing “increased demand” for payment stickers from banks. At the same time, the demand for payment rings, bracelets, key chains and other accessories has grown. Andrey Pilishenko, Product Director of ALIOT, connects the trend with the departure of international payment systems from the Russian Federation, when users lost the opportunity to pay using various Pay’s (Apple Pay, Huawei Pay, etc.).

According to Mr. Pilishenko, in the coming months, “the share of stickers will be about 70% of all payment form factors, while in absolute terms, sales of rings, key rings and bracelets will also grow.” According to him, at present, for stickers, “orders for tens and hundreds of thousands of pieces are being worked out, for other form factors, the average order is several thousand devices.” Tinkoff Bank believes that this year the demand for TinkoffPay stickers will exceed several million.

At the same time, a source on the payment market familiar with the proposed technology says to Kommersant that using such devices “certain difficulties are associated, due to which they were not widely used earlier, although they appeared on the Russian market in the early 2010s “. According to him, for example, in the ring, the antenna, through which the signal from the chip passes to the terminal, is located so that if it is brought perpendicular to the terminal, the signal may not pass. The sticker may have other problems – the smartphone has its own antenna, which can conflict with the antenna of the sticker, and here it will be important on which part of the smartphone or case the device is pasted.

“The main difficulty is that in cases where the device did not work and the payment failed, customers will start calling the call center, and if there are at least 5% of such calls, this can destroy the entire economics of promoting these form factors,”— the interlocutor explained to Kommersant.

Experts are also skeptical about the long-term prospects of emerging payment form factors. The head of the board of the Financial Innovations Association, Roman Prokhorov, believes that they “are unlikely to be able to take a significant share in the payment market in the context of active promotion of SBP services that are not supported by these form factors.”

According to Dmitry Vishnyakov, an independent expert on the payment card market, such solutions are likely to remain niche. “Today, there is no market anywhere in the world where such forms would occupy a significant share,” he notes. According to Sergey Khromov’s forecast, payment stickers and accessories will be in demand by customers on the horizon up to two years, and in the future they will be replaced by domestic solutions for paying with a smartphone, which are still under development.

Maxim Buylov