BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 22
By Eldar Janashvili – Trend:
Some 27 percent of payments today in Azerbaijan are contactless, a source in Visa company told Trend on June 22.
The company stressed that despite the decrease in the number of contactless transactions due to the closure of shopping centers during the quarantine regime, the share of such transactions in the total structure of cashless payments has grown.
In particular, an increase in the share of contactless transactions in April amounted to five percent.
“Thus, the corporation seeks to introduce the most comfortable innovations for people,” the source added. “In particular, we are taking a number of measures aimed at supporting this trend in Azerbaijan.”
For example, Visa announced an increase in the limit of Visa Easy Payment service for contactless payments without entering a PIN code up to 80 manat ($47), providing users with easy and safe contactless payment.
“As the limit has been enshrined in the regulatory documents of the Central Bank of Azerbaijan, we appealed to the regulator to consider the possibility of making the appropriate changes, which will allow the banks to increase the limit by 60 percent,” the company said. “This step will make daily transactions more convenient and allow customers to pay for bigger purchases via contactless method."
Moreover, as of today, three banks, namely, the International Bank of Azerbaijan, Kapital Bank and Bank Respublika, have already connected to the Visa Token Service technology in Azerbaijan and several more banks are being connected.
Taking into account that the first payments by tokens in Azerbaijan appeared only in September 2019, presently, there is a boom associated with the launch of the three biggest issuers in this ecosystem.
In general, the number of tokenized transactions increased by 45 times from September 2019 through May 2020.
"Our further task is to support the efforts of the regulator and partner banks to promote mobile payments in Azerbaijan,” the company said. “After the successful launch of the Visa Token Service, Visa and the Central Bank of Azerbaijan announced about the launch of the “Pay by Using Mobile Application with Visa” campaign. The two-month campaign is aimed at promoting mobile contactless payments among consumers and an increase in the number of tokenized transactions in the country."
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