Mir Pay service is currently supported by 40 banks





Izvestia reports that the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) is considering the possibility of making the Mir Pay service a mandatory application for preinstallation on electronics sold in Russia.





The potential audience of the application will be tens of millions of Russian buyers of smartphones that support NFC contactless payment technology.

Mir Pay, like Apple Pay, Google Pay or Samsung Pay, allows you to pay for goods and services using a smartphone equipped with an NFC module. According to Svyaznoy, for 11 months of 2019, approximately 11.7 million devices supporting this technology were sold in Russia.





Mir Pay service is currently supported by 40 banks. The share of payments via smartphones with linked Mir cards over the past three years has grown six-fold - from 3% in 2017 to 19% in 2019. Every day, about 600 new users associate their cards with the application.





More than half of payments via smartphone are made in supermarkets, another 18% - in cafes and restaurants. Over 70 million Mir cards have already been issued; in the third quarter of 2019, the share of the card in the total issue of plastic in Russia amounted to 22.4%.





On November 21, the State Duma adopted in the third, final reading a law stipulating the need for pre-installation on smartphones, computers and televisions with Smart-TV function of applications targeted at the Russian audience. The law is supposed to enter into force on July 1, 2020.





The national Russian payment system Mir was created in 2015.





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Mir Pay, like Apple or Samsung Pay, allows you to pay for goods and services using a smartphone equipped with a special NFC chip. According to Svyaznoy, for 11 months of 2019, approximately 11.7 million devices supporting this technology were sold in Russia.





The share of payments using smartphones with Mir cards over the past three years has grown six-fold - from 3% in 2017 to 19% in 2019, the NSPK presentation said (the document is at the disposal of Izvestia). It emphasizes that the service for payment via Mir Pay supports already 40 banks, daily about 600 new users associate their cards with the application.





More than half of payments via smartphone are made in supermarkets, another 18% - in cafes and restaurants, the NSPK emphasizes in its materials. More than 70 million Mir cards have already been issued; in the III quarter of 2019, the share of the card in the total issue of plastic in Russia amounted to 22.4%, the company's presentation says.





The Otkritie Bank told Izvestia that more than half of customers make payments via smartphone via Apple Pay, Google Pay is the second most popular, Samsung Pay is the third.





The number of Mir Pay users is still insignificant, said Dmitry Bocherov, head of the transaction business department of the credit institution. According to him, owners of Apple products are most active in terms of connecting contactless "telephone" payments. In order for the number of Mir Pay users to increase significantly, this application must be available on iOS, he believes.





According to the latest data, pensioners are becoming more and more active users of smartphones in Russia, who receive payments from the state specifically to Mir cards - for this category of citizens, the pre-installation of the Mir Pay application will be in demand, Novikombank told Izvestia.