New contenders have joined the competition for the title of Russia’s national payment system. So, the executives of the two largest payment processing system, Novosibirsk-based Golden Crown and Samara-based Union Card, brought forward their plans and ideas at a round- table meeting at the Federation Council. In addition to 20 small local payment systems, each of the above-mentioned major systems has been operating in Russia for a long time, handles a huge amount of cash, and uses its own licensed technology. The latter deserves a special attention. The third contender, Sberbank, uses the M/Chip technology developed by MasterCard. That is why, a self-developed technology is a big advantage. Since 1994, Golden Crown has issued over 8 million own cards and 11 million cards in partnership with MasterCard and China’s Union Pay. Golden Crown cards are processed by 34,000 cash machines. This payment system embraces 513 banks. Meanwhile, Union Card cannot boast of such impressive results. 850,000 cards have been issued so far. They are accepted by 3,200 ATM machines around Russia. Union Card cooperates with 31 banks. “In early 2000s, our payment system included 500 banks. In fact, it was the national payment processing system. However, the banks opted for international payment systems. So, they set about installing their card processing centers and emission sank,” Andrey Slesarenko, Union Card CEO, told. The project called Universal Electronic Card has issued just 295,500 cards. However, the widest network of over 90,000 Sberbank’s ATM machines is a weighty point in its favor. In a nutshell, each of the three contenders enjoys its advantage. Thus, experts tend to believe that the three major companies will be engaged to create the national payment system in Russia. “It is not quite right to create the national payment system scheme based on the one of the available systems. It will make us dependent on technologies and economic solutions offered by a certain group of shareholders. It is the bank of Russia that should function as the operational and clearing center while the other systems with their payment centers are supposed to issue cards of the national payment system. In other words, they will function as its operators,” Andrey Yemelin, the Chairman of the National Council on the financial market, stated.