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Comment by tananaev | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that the title says all operations are suspended, but description basically says that foreign cards won't work in Russia and Russian cards work abroad, but does it mean local Russian cards will still work in Russia? That's probably majority of transactions anyway. A bit confused here.

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Russia has a home-grown card payment network (Mir) that accounts for 25% of payments. It will probably grow because of the sanctions.

Edit: 25% might be false. Maybe 25% of cards are Mir-only? I'd appreciate if any Russian could chime in to clarify the percentages.

It doesn't really matter how many Mir cards are—they're just a home-grown Russian brand of a card.

The real issue is that all transactions inside Russia using Visa, MC or Mir are processed inside Russia by the same entity that runs Mir brand, and therefore won't stop working.

Which they created in 2015, after we threatened SWIFT removal for the Crimea invasion, along with a SWIFT alternative called SPFS.

It really wouldn't surprise me if the Russian state fully anticipated and expected these financial sanctions from the West, and have positioned themselves to profit from it after some short term pain.

My understanding is a Chinese payment network is being introduced to pickup the slack.

Which, tbh, was pretty much the stated intention before starting the conflict - cut off the new superpowers and their historic satellite states dependence on [insolvent] western financiers.

Rip the band-aid off and take some hairs with it!

Very. They (China, Russia, India) are calling it "the multi polar world". Knocking swift, visa, mastercard and the dollar out of every country they can has been a goal for years, and now they are handing it them on a plate. Sigh.

Probably just a matter of time until people start to avoid buying China or India products too

It seems mostly to be about oil, plastics and silicon - especially rare earth based silicon.

Commenting more in the sense they are supporting non democratic states. The same way companies/consumers(?) are moving out of Russia, they could reduce spending on products from places that fail at environmental, social, governance and democratic levels (it comes with its own set of problems though)

The MastarCard statement suggests that Russian cards will not work in Russia.

> we have decided to suspend our network services in Russia.

See reply by assusdan:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30572790

They still work within Russia as the network is not run by MasterCard within Russia.

It's phrased very carefully "cards issued by Russian banks will no longer be supported by the Mastercard network", which sounds like they still might work in Russia even if they are not supported by the network. Next sentence is "any Mastercard issued outside of the country will not work at Russian merchants". Why make this clear distinction? Why not just say that all Mastercard won't work in Russia?

I worked in credit card acquiring business (implemented credit card application for the terminal).

Cards with Mastercard or Visa logo can still work without Mastercard or Visa processing the payments.

Obviously, they do work in ATMs.

For normal payments it is possible for another company to step in and process the payments. That would be massive effort but not impossible to get done in say couple of weeks.

But that would still mean that the system would be cut off from the rest of the world -- cards issued by Russian banks would not be valid outside of the new system. Cards outside of Russia would not work because it cannot communicate with Russian system. And cards issued outside of Russia would not work inside Russia for the same reason -- the transaction would not be possible to authorise across the border.

> For normal payments it is possible for another company to step in and process the payments. That would be massive effort but not impossible to get done in say couple of weeks.

Per another comment, the massive effort has already happened over the preceding years, out of the expectation that something like this was going to happen sooner or later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30572790

> But that would still mean that the system would be cut off from the rest of the world

Could Russian banks adopt China's UnionPay as an alternative to Visa/MasterCard? UnionPay is already accepted in many Western countries due to the desire to gain the business of Chinese nationals (tourists, business travellers, international students, etc). Would it be technically possible for a Western intermediary processor to distinguish a Russian UnionPay card from a Chinese one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(payment_system)

Lots of them are co-branded with UnionPay.

Yes, all cards issues by russian banks (Mir, MasterCard, Visa) work inside of russia, because in 2014 Russian central bank forced all payment systems to work through processing center in Moscow.

Besides, Russian banks are already promoting new cards - "Mir + UnionPay", where Union Pay is Chinese alternative to MC and Visa and it should be possible to use new Mir cards everywhere abroad where UnionPay is accepted.

It should not be difficult to differentiate between Union Pay cards issued in Russia vs. China, if there was such a need.

According to the nytimes cards might still work in the country.

"The suspensions announced on Saturday evening will prevent Mastercards and Visa cards issued by Russian banks from working in other countries and block people with cards issued elsewhere from purchasing goods and services from companies in Russia.

But other transactions may still go through. Cards branded with the Mastercard or Visa logo that were issued by Russian banks may still work inside the country, because the transactions are handled by a local processor, officials at both companies said."

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/03/05/world/russia-ukraine...

A lot of stores in Russia are currently not accepting many credit cards, including domestic ones.

... And, as the cherry on top, ATM withdrawals have been blocked.

Presumably, this will all be figured out over the next week, but it's not great.

> does it mean local Russian cards will still work in Russia?

Yes. At least Tinkoff bank says so.

I'm more worried about GooglePay.

The only reason I did not bought Huawei last time was NFC+GooglePay.

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