Interview with TAdviser: Vladimir Troyanovsky, NSPK - about the IT strategy and plans for the development of the Russian payment system

Vladimir Troyanovsky: The popularity of our products, the number of users of our services is growing every year. In 2021, the number of interbank operations in Mira increased by 42% compared to 2020, amounting to 4.5 billion transactions. Many different factors contributed to this. The development of the products of the Mir payment system, the emergence of new mobile payment services available to cardholders, and the active connection of issuing banks to Pay services, the emergence of new favorable shares in various segments, the increase in the issue and the number of users of Mir - all this, including, affected the growth in the number of transactions. We see this both on interbank traffic and on intra-bank traffic, which colleagues share with us. By the end of 2021, the number of participants in the Mir payment system exceeded 270 banks, 23 of which were foreign banks.

We also ensure the continuity and availability of card transactions of all international payment systems in Russia, not only Mir (since 2015, the NSPK has been processing all domestic card transactions of all payment systems - approx. TAdviser).

Another service, the technical component of which is supported by World Plat.Form, is the Bank of Russia Quick Payment System (SBP). The most popular of the services of the System is instant transfers of money from citizen to citizen by phone number, launched in early 2019. It allows not only instantly, but also without a commission to transfer amounts of up to 100 thousand rubles per month between accounts in different banks. The transfer can be made both to the account of another person and to your own account from one bank to another. In 2021, the popularity of such translations also continued to grow. Compared to 2020, the number of such transfers increased by almost 8 times, and by the amount - by 6 times (855 million transactions by 4.9 trillion rubles). The number of users has grown 3 times, at least once 44 million Russians have already transferred money in this way.

Payment with the help of the SBP actively penetrates into the business sphere: the number of trade and service enterprises that connected the acceptance of payments through the System increased 4 times over the year, reaching 292 thousand in 2021. The number of operations compared to 2020 increased almost 19 times, in terms of the amount - 16 times (13.3 million operations by 61.5 billion rubles). And there were almost 19 times more users, already 5 million people paid for purchases through the SBP.

But we are developing other areas of fintech, the brightest of which over the past year, perhaps, can be called the loyalty program of the Mir payment system. Based on the loyalty program solution we created, we can make any projects, promotions related to cashback. We return cashback to the Mir card in a short period - from 3 to 5 days - to customers registered in the loyalty program.

We conducted many actions with large partners in various segments. In addition, since 2020, our platform has been used for a large-scale project of Rostourism, we are a technical partner of Tourist Cashback. We can talk about it in the present time, because from January 18 a new stage of the program started.

Vladimir Troyanovsky: Yes, participants connect to it using the API. We can also set up a promotion on this platform on our side. In general, we have most of the self-described software products used. Due to the specifics of our work, we cannot buy ready-made solutions for our needs, so we create them ourselves. For a number of companies in the market, for example, banks, there is ready-made software, but this is not suitable for us.

Our entire landscape is designed to minimize possible errors.

Vladimir Troyanovsky: In general, yes, but here we do not stand still. In 2020, for example, we switched from Oracle JDK to the domestic Java distribution - Liberica JDK - to support high availability and secure processing systems. Oracle JDK was dependent, we left it.

Vladimir Troyanovsky: If we talk about our main, transactional activity, then there are no databases in the landscape of the system serving transactions. We originally designed and were able to implement it. This is our know-how. In some other systems we use PostgreSQL DBMS, the free version. For example, it is used for a loyalty program.

Vladimir Troyanovsky: Due to the global trend in chip shortages today, many iron developers, including domestic ones, are not able to meet demand. Everyone has problems with chips, for example, even automakers. Now there are cases when they supply cars without any "chips." The same with servers: in some cases they can be purchased, but without any functions. Unfortunately, there are such situations. We're looking at what happens next.

Vladimir Troyanovsky: We are in a unique position: we initially built a company under intense transactional traffic, with a reserve. Therefore, our entire infrastructure, all our applications, independently written by us using modern technologies, are initially optimized for heavy traffic. In this regard, in addition to purchasing several pieces of equipment, we, by and large, do nothing more. To withstand a large number of transactions, both daily and peak, is our main function, we are sharpened under it.

And unlike the situation in other financial institutions, we do not have a heavy historical legacy from IT systems. It makes life much easier for us.

Vladimir Troyanovsky: One of the main focuses of our strategy is tokenization (a technology that allows you to secure mobile payments - approx. TAdviser) and everything related to this. Because, as we see, people want to pay quickly and conveniently, making as little effort as possible. This, of course, is convenient when the user has everything concentrated in the phone. In this regard, we plan to work more in the direction of tokenization of Mir maps.

We have already done a lot to develop contactless payments on Mir cards, so that as many cardholders as possible can pay from a smartphone regardless of what their phone is. For example, we have our own development, Mir Pay - our wallet, launched in 2019, it works on any Android smartphone, including Huawei without Google services. Android phones are very popular in Russia due to the large number of models with a relatively low cost with rich functionality. Therefore, we implemented Mir Pay so that, regardless of the manufacturer of the smartphone, Mir cardholders can use a fast and convenient mobile service to pay for travel, everyday purchases.

In addition to tokenization, a large branch in our IT strategy is associated with SBP. In 2022, new opportunities will appear in it. For example, we have already tested the B2B translation service, which allows you to instantly conduct calculations between legal entities at any time.

Also, the Bank of Russia previously proposed in 2022 to test the payroll service by phone number through the SBP.

We also developed the SBPei application for installing on a smartphone in order to use the same technologies, but through the NFC there was an opportunity to make payments. In 2022, this feature will be available on both Android and IOS phones. The plans also include embedding SBPei as a payment method in other applications by analogy with Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Vladimir Troyanovsky: Now there are already a great many different payment tools, and we will continue this year to work to give Russians even more opportunities to use the Mir cards. We have all the technology for this. When all this first started, years 5-6 ago, we were the first companies to help go this way. And now these are rolled rails: we have all the documents on connection, tools, an ecosystem has already been created. On our part now, mostly minor help or support is required when connecting.

Vladimir Troyanovsky: Contactless mobile payment technologies in Russia have been actively developing since 2016-2017. Naturally, for us, as for the Mir payment system, this is also a very important element in the financial ecosystem of Russia, because it is convenient. Since 2017, Samsung Pay has been available to Mir cardholders. Since 2019, we have introduced our own Mir Pay wallet on Android. And in the summer of 2021, together with Apple, we launched the possibility of tokenizing Mir cards in Apple Pay.

If we talk about the dynamics of contactless payment on the cards of all payment systems, including international ones, then the share of transactions performed on a plastic card in a contactless way increased from 16% in 2017 to 62% in 2021. In January-November 2021, the share of contactless transactions for paying for goods and services with Mir cards in retail outlets reached 83% of the total number of transactions. And a third of traffic already falls on tokenized payments - payment using smartphones and Pay services - 32%. All this suggests that payment in a contact way is a thing of the past.

Vladimir Troyanovsky: Yes, we did it. We have our development center in Tomsk with a team of several dozen people, which is part of our distributed development team. It was discovered before the pandemic. The presence of such a center is very convenient, because in Tomsk plus 4 hours compared to Moscow, and due to this we extended the useful time for the development of our software products. In addition, this allowed expanding the World Plat.Form team with talented guys who, for some reason, cannot move to work in Moscow.

Vladimir Troyanovsky: The pandemic has influenced the fact that now such realities. But we asked this question before the pandemic, so we know how to motivate developers to stay in the company. In 2019, we created a new brand - World Plat.form, which brings together technical specialists who create products in the NSPK - products for Mir, SBP, loyalty programs, etc. Under this brand, now our experts speak at conferences, talk about what we are doing, what we have achieved. And the company cares very much about developers. Moreover, material goods work for a very short time - 2-3 months, and then people get used to this income and want something more. Therefore, we stimulate developers not only with salaries that we have at the market level, but also with interesting tasks, the spirit of the team and other ways.

Training is also an important factor. We began to invest in it too before the pandemic. The shortage of personnel began to be felt somewhere else since 2018. Therefore, they created several areas of training. There is DIT School - a school of the IT department, where we teach on several tracks: the basics of Java, Linux, Kubernetes and other popular areas. This is very convenient - you can study on the job. In addition, we have several centralized schools in technical areas where you can study from scratch: in the direction of Java, software testing. And this year we are still launching a school of analysts.

At the same time, the company does not skimp on external training, if the employee needs to undergo it. We understand how to evaluate specialists, what competencies they need to learn, so that they are as effective as possible, and are ready to invest in such training.

Vladimir Troyanovsky: By the increase in the number of projects, customers and transactions, it is clear that we are growing. Of course, in order to ensure such growth, on the one hand, there must be people who support all this. In them, the company invests, teaches, as I said. We have all the resources to attract the best personnel from the market. The other side of the coin is the need to invest in equipment to support explosive growth. But, as I also noted, from the very beginning we built an IT landscape, imagining what type of financial transactions to service. It is all built on a very simple "iron," on simple servers. We have nothing expensive, "heavy," requiring millions of dollars for maintenance.

Therefore, I can generally say that there is growth in the IT budget. At the same time, we pay special attention to information security, safe development and invest knowledge, our experience and much more there.

Vladimir Troyanovsky: We work with a large number of technology giants. Most often, this is cooperation in the field of holding various joint actions, which are carried out either on the basis of our loyalty program, or it is just mechanics with cashback or discounts. With VK (previously - Mail.ru), for example, last year we had an action with cashback Mail.ru Combo. And right now there is a discount at Yandex.Refueling when paying with the help of SBP.

But now the boundaries between technology companies and e-commerce are blurring. The same AliExpress, Wildberries, for example - they are already fintech companies themselves. We also cooperate with them.