“SBPey” is put on the plates – Newspaper Kommersant No. 221 (7422) dated 11/29/2022

For nine months, more than 1.1 thousand points of contactless payment via NFC-tablets and SBPey have been installed in Russia. The developers of the system say that the demand for such payments is growing and plan to expand the number of outlets. But not all banks want to use SBPey, no matter how the payment is organized, continuing to concentrate on plastic cards that are more profitable for them.

In Russian stores, the number of plates with an NFC chip for payment has increased significantly, Ivan Bortnik, CEO of NewPay, who installs them, told Kommersant. According to him, over 1,100 points of contactless payment via NFC have been equipped in 40 cities in nine months, and 700 more points are planned to be opened in the near future. Shoppers, he said, have become more willing to use QR codes or NFC technology to pay. Over the last quarter, NewPay has seen an increase in transactions from 1,000 to 3,000 per day.

Contactless payment via NFC-tablets occurs as follows: an employee at the checkout enters the amount and selects the NewPay (SBP) payment method, the information is transferred to the chip in the NFC-tablet, and the client brings the phone (Android or iOS), automatically redirects to a page on the Internet with a branded payment screen, on which he sees the amount and will be able to select a bank for payment through SBPey to confirm the payment and select an account. This is how a simple NFC tag works. If an NFC-Tag is installed, payment via SBPey occurs without downloading the application. You can also pay by scanning a QR code if your phone does not support NFC.

The payer’s bank must be a member of the fast payment system (FPS; owned by the developer of the Mir payment system – the National Payment Card System, NSPK) and support payment using QR codes in the mobile bank. SBPey has more than 1 million downloads, the number of its users and participating banks continues to grow, Kommersant was told at NSPK.

NewPay’s partner in the production of NFC plates is the Russian ISBC (based on chips, including those manufactured by Mikron, it manufactures RFID and NFC products: smart cards for transport or social cards of residents, key fobs for smart intercom, etc. ). According to Andrey Eremenko, director of the banking projects department at ISBC, the company issues several million ISBC Pay payment plates with NFC technology + QR code per month.

Now among the banks that accept payment via NFC-tablets are Russian Standard, Raiffeisenbank, MKB, etc. The press service of Russian Standard Bank says that the technology allows saving on the purchase of additional client screens for Among the advantages are also the instant speed of transferring funds, a fixed commission up to 0.4% or 0.7% depending on the business.

But so far, not all major banks want to promote NFC tags, Kommersant’s interlocutor in the financial sector notes. In particular, Sberbank and Alfa-Bank, according to him, are still focused on plastic cards. Due to the blocking of Apple Pay, Google Pay and other foreign services in Russia, the purchase and installation of NFC tags has risen in price, which was one of the reasons for the “slow transition” of some large banks to the SBPey system, says the interlocutor of Kommersant. Andrey Eremenko acknowledges that prices have risen throughout the NFC production chain. Alfa-Bank assured that they are in the process of connecting to SBPay, “at the same time, all customers can already make purchases using SBP in Alfa-Mobile from the main screen of the application and in the Internet bank.” Sberbank did not answer “Kommersant”.

The insufficiently active connection of trade and service enterprises to SBPey is due to the lower profitability of such operations for banks compared to card transactions, says Roman Prokhorov, head of the board of the Financial Innovations Association. Dmitry Vishnyakov, an independent expert on the payment card market, agrees with him. According to him, the interbank commission on cards is much higher, and therefore it is more profitable to develop card payments, “surveys of a possible restriction of the SBPey application due to sanctions may also play a role.”

Timofey Kornev, Maxim Builov