UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 11, 2017. The telecommunications provider MegaFon’s bank card is now eight times more popular in the Urals than at the beginning of the year, with overall turnover at over RUR 300m a month. Locals most typically use the card to pay for their supermarket shopping and to cover restaurant checks, the company press service reports.

While food items are on top of the list, gasoline, medicines, mobile devices, car parts, household/remodeling appliances, clothes, taxi rides, and entertainment are also often paid for with MegaFon cards.

Taxi fares come the cheapest, while loan repayments are currently the most expensive items on the transaction list, with average transaction amounts at RUR 136 and RUR 9,300, respectively. A boss is granted for every purchase you pay for with MegaFon card.

‘We have been giving our users some Internet traffic back for every RUR 100 of their transaction amount since August. This special offer proved so popular that MegaFon Ural now gives back 1.5m Mb worth of traffic every day. This is enough traffic to upload more than 350,000 high quality pictures onto social networks, for example,’ says MegaFon Ural Mass Market Development Director Sergey Alferov.

According to MegaFon, iPhone owners use mobile payment apps much more heavily than Samsung users. Seven times more purchases get made with Apple Pay rather than with the help of any other app/system. Also, men make up 63% of MegaFon card holders.