RBC learned that the Chinese UnionPay has limited the acceptance of its cards issued abroad in Russia

The Chinese payment system UnionPay has limited work with Russian acquiring banks that have been under the sanctions of Western countries: it has introduced a ban on servicing its cards issued by foreign banks in their POS terminals. The RBC agency was told about this by two sources in banks and an interlocutor in the payment market.

According to the source, UnionPay could have made such a decision due to fear of secondary sanctions. Another source at the bank clarifies that the cards stopped working in the spring.

Such cards are mostly held by Chinese tourists, but paying via WeChat is more important for them.

In March 2022, the largest international payment systems Visa and Mastercard left Russia after the launch of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine and the imposition of large-scale sanctions against the Russian financial sector after that. Their foreign cards do not work in Russia, and Russian cards do not work abroad. UnionPay remains the only international payment system that continues to operate in Russia.

We also recall that at the end of April, RBC noted that large Russian banks that fell under Western sanctions would not be able to issue UnionPay cards, since the Chinese payment system was afraid to cooperate with them because of the risk of secondary sanctions.

Thus, a source close to Sberbank told the agency that their employees were informed about this decision at a closed meeting. In early March, Sberbank was considering options for issuing a co-badged card of the Mir and UnionPay payment systems, and a month later the credit institution fell under US blocking sanctions.

A similar possibility was considered by Alfa-Bank, Otkritie and VTB. Promsvyazbank, which issued UnionPay cards before falling under sanctions, stopped doing so at that time.