The Central Bank of the Russian Federation intends to oblige banks to raise the minimum daily limits on the volume of transactions in the Fast Payment System (FPS) to 150 thousand rubles. This is stated in the draft, published on Thursday, February 11, on the regulator’s website.
According to the document, banks will have to adjust their limits by October 1. Such measures, according to the Central Bank, will help increase the availability of transfers through the SBP for citizens.
In addition to this, the regulator obliged the system participants from April 1, 2022 to provide customers with the opportunity to pay for purchases and services using the SBP mobile application (SBPay), in which the QR code is scanned along a convenient client path, and to make payment through the SBP in any trade service companies connected to this payment method.
On February 2, Izvestia received a letter from the Association of Internet Trade Companies (AKIT) to the Central Bank, in which retailers complained that they could not consider payment by QR codes a full-fledged alternative to merchant acquiring due to the banks’ flaws in the functionality of their mobile applications and inconvenient client functionality.
Then AKIT offered to conduct transactions directly through the SBP application, which would allow customers to be isolated from banking ecosystems. It was noted that at that time 37 banks in more than 69 thousand retail outlets offered payment by QR codes in SBP. Since September 1, 2019, when the functionality was launched, Russians have made about 900 thousand C2B payments worth about 5 billion rubles.
At the end of January, Izvestia was informed by the Bank of Russia that since the launch of the fast payment system on January 28, 2019, Russians have made 139 million transfers worth about 1 trillion rubles.
According to the National Payment Card System, which acts as the clearing center of the SBP, 211 financial organizations are connected to the service. The fast payment system allows customers to transfer money by phone number to accounts in different banks. From May 1, 2020, the commission for transferring funds in an amount below 100 thousand rubles per month is zero.