VISA, UBRD introduce ruble as international payments currency
21 May 2013 (09:19)
May 21, 2013. The Ural Bank for Reconstruction & Development (UBRD) proved Russia’s banking market first player to use the ruble as the VISA international payments currency. According to the UBRD Bank Card Management Director Alexei Piskunov, this will bring the costs down for ruble-card holders when they use their cards abroad, the bank’s press service reports.
‘We used to recommend our customers to open euro accounts before using their UBRD-issued VISA cards in countries that have their own currency, such as Turkey, Egypt, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and some others. The thing is, our settlements with the VISA system had to be made in the official Eurozone currency. And now it is cheaper for our customers to use their ruble account VISA cards, as the money will be converted from a country’s national currency directly into rubles,’ Piskunov explains.
According to the UBRD’s own estimates, the overwhelming majority of the bank’s VISA cardholders preferred to set up ruble accounts rather than any other currency accounts last year. As of January 1, 2013, over 930,000 card accounts were set up with the UBRD, which amounted to 99.7% of all the accounts. In 2012, the bank’s VISA cardholders performed nearly 240,000 transactions outside Russia. The shopping turnover thus reached more than 1.2bn RUR, while the national currency transactions (excluding those made in rubles, dollars, or euros) came to 40% of the total amount of transactions carried out abroad.
‘We used to recommend our customers to open euro accounts before using their UBRD-issued VISA cards in countries that have their own currency, such as Turkey, Egypt, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and some others. The thing is, our settlements with the VISA system had to be made in the official Eurozone currency. And now it is cheaper for our customers to use their ruble account VISA cards, as the money will be converted from a country’s national currency directly into rubles,’ Piskunov explains.
According to the UBRD’s own estimates, the overwhelming majority of the bank’s VISA cardholders preferred to set up ruble accounts rather than any other currency accounts last year. As of January 1, 2013, over 930,000 card accounts were set up with the UBRD, which amounted to 99.7% of all the accounts. In 2012, the bank’s VISA cardholders performed nearly 240,000 transactions outside Russia. The shopping turnover thus reached more than 1.2bn RUR, while the national currency transactions (excluding those made in rubles, dollars, or euros) came to 40% of the total amount of transactions carried out abroad.
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