Olha Maklashyna, executive director and head of Sbera’s cybersecurity department, announced at the Paymentsecurity online conference the “perfect” plan to tackle the chip shortage. According to him, this will allow the bank to save up to 1 billion rubles in 2022.

New Russian deficit

• After exiting the Visa and Mastercard payment systems market and Western sanctions, chip shortages arose in Russia.

• Only non-activated cards are used for the so-called “reimplantation”. For example, that users ordered in the app or reissued after expiration, but did not receive it from the bank branch.
• Such cards are deposited in branches, and then collectors take them to emission centers.
• There, all the data is extracted from the chip, then taken to the bank card manufacturer, who inserts it into new plastic.

Chips have decreased, they have become more expensive, accordingly our colleagues from the emissions center came up with a solution close to genius – reimplantation of bank card chips. So, we started removing chips from cards and putting them on new cards,
– says Olga Maklashyna.

At the same time, Maklashyna says that the number of inactive cards has reached 375,000 per month. A new chip for the card costs 5 euros, reinstatement costs 1.3 euros.

Now Russia is urgently trying to replace European chips. For example, many were supplied by Dutch NXP Semiconductors. China is named as a possible supplier, but the situation is very unstable as the country tries to balance and avoid direct support of the aggressor, fearing Western sanctions.