The Bank of Moscow is currently piloting an EMV debit application on a multi-application smart card that is issued to students, pensioners and other recipients of state aid. While the contactless Mifare transit application on the card facilitates free or discounted fares on the Moscow metro, the bank is to test dual-interface cards that link the Mifare application with an EMV debit function. In the next few months, 20,000 of these cards will be tested, and on this basis, the bank will decide whether to convert the 2 million-plus Visa Electron-based social cards that are currently in issue.
Visa International’s SVP of smart card implementation, Denny Jensen, confirms that government officials in St Petersburg and other cities in the CIS, are interested in the multi-function EMV cards. “They like the model being used: transit, secure payment and secure benefit”, Jensen said. The cards will be attractive to government agencies wanting to cut fraudulent benefit claims, with the Moscow Metro, for one, having cut fraudulent transit benefits substantially since contactless cards were introduced for fare collection in 1998.
In separate news, the World Bank is to give Russia about USD 620 million in loans to develop its IT sector with a view to enabling the country to save up to RUR 30bn (about $978million) a year. To date, about 400,000 employees deal with data processing functions in Russia, and citizens spend some 3-4 billion man hours a year communicating with government agencies. The use of IT to automate these processes, will deliver a 20 per cent reduction in costs, as each document is copied up to 20 times, according to Leonid Reiman, Minister for Information and Communication.
Bankrate.com
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