December 5, 2012. Yekaterinburg is now of the top 20 Russian cities with the greatest number of companies that accept credit and debit cards for payments. The rating is topped by Surgut, Izhevsk, and Nizhnevartovsk: these cities have the greatest share of companies whose goods and services can be paid for using a bank card. This information is available from the research carried out by 2GIS, who compared 180 Russian cities in terms of organizations that process cards issued by international payment systems.

The research resulted in singling out the top 20 cities where cash is not quite so necessary at all, as plenty of POS accept bank cards. Surgut has the largest share of such companies, as every one in four shops or service centers accepts credit cards. Among the top 5 cities are also Izhevsk, Nizhnevartovsk, Voronezh, and Arkhangelsk. Yekaterinburg was given the 6th position: the share of card-processing companies comes to 19.2% here. Contrary to all expectations, Moscow did not even make it to the top ten and was given the 12th position in the rating, while Saint Petersburg was given the 17th position.

As was to be expected, large cities made it to the top of the rating in terms of the absolute number of card-accepting companies. Moscow is in the first place: there are 43,000 such businesses there. The capital is followed by Saint Petersburg (about 20,000 companies), Yekaterinburg (10,000), Nizhniy Novgorod (7,000), and Novosibirsk (6,400).