📋 Tender Overview
The NSPK decided to fight for fair commissions from card payments of international payment systems for users.NSPK the operator of the Mir payment system is stepping up the fight against merchants that replace MCC codes to reduce acquiring fees. If earlier fines were issued only on Mir cards it was associated with the fight against illegal casinos but now the practice is spreading to international payment systems.For reference the MCC code is the code for the type of trade enterprise which is used in the field of bank cards to classify businesses by type of activity.NSPK has updated the offer for credit institutions that issue or service MPS cards. The new version of the document regulates a penalty rate for interchange in the amount of 2.35 if the MCC code of the merchant does not correspond to the activity that it conducts.Experts explain that this is a commission paid by the acquiring bank serving the merchant to the issuing bank whose cards are used by customers to pay for services or goods. The tariff introduced by NSPK is the maximum possible. It is paid by the acquirer despite the fact that the merchant will continue to pay the acquiring commission under the contract. As a result the acquiring bank will pay more for the interchange than it receives commissions from the merchant. And if a discrepancy is revealed the commissions paid by the acquirer to the issuer will be recalculated for the last three months at the maximum rate.At the moment NSPK is an operational clearing center for cards of international payment systems and Mir. For Mir cards such fines have existed for a long time and for the Ministry of Railways this innovation is only planed to be introduced.Identification of the substitution of MCC codes is often carried out according to the statements of bank customers who do not receive the expected cashback but this is not the only way. The payment system operator can audit acquirers and the basis for this may be the appeal of the bank that did not receive the expected interchange. For identified violations acquiring banks may be excluded from the payment system.Experts believe that today miscoding code substitution is no longer as common as 2-3 years ago when cross-border operations in casinos under the guise of other types of business were extremely common. Not the last role in this was played by the system of fines.
