The State Duma will consider a bill that could lead to the departure of Visa and MasterCard from Russia
On July 23, the State Duma will discuss amendments to the law “On the National Payment System” in the second reading. The law prohibits international payment systems (IPS) on the territory of Russia to comply with international sanctions. The adoption of new regulations is highly likely to lead to the withdrawal of Visa and MasterCard from the domestic market.
According to Kommersant, the main task of the law is to ensure the continuity of card payments in Russia. The latter is now in question, since the policy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a whole refuses to make payments on bank cards that have fallen under a certain type of international sanctions.
For example, if the US government puts forward any large-scale sanctions against a group of Russian banks, some MPs will be forced to comply with them. And lawmakers want to exclude such a scenario.
“[The bill is intended to] prohibit any payment systems from prescribing in their rules the possibility of disconnecting Russian banks from making payments on cards. We should not encourage such shutdowns and tolerate discriminatory rules,” said Anatoly Aksakov, the author of the amendments, who holds the post of head of the State Duma Committee on the Financial Market.
The problem is that the introduction of new regulations will force the MPS, which include the Russian daughters of Visa, MasterCard, China Union Pay and others, to change the internal rules. As experts note in an interview with Kommersant, this will be impossible: from a legal point of view, the daughters cannot fail to comply with the rules of the parent company.
In turn, the parent companies will not do this, because there are many reasons for excluding the bank from the payment system. The matter is far from being limited to sanctions alone. For example, the bank may be disconnected because it violated the rules of the payment system itself — it did not pay for transactions.
However, if the Russian daughters do not change the rules, they will be banned from working in Russia. They will be forced to leave.
In theory, already issued cards of the system excluded from the register in Russia will then work through the National Payment Card System (NSPK). However, the latter had previously concluded contracts not with banks, but with MPS. And there is a real threat that all payments on cards within the country will stop.
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