BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 3. Kazakhstan's Halyk Bank has ceased servicing MIR cards as of February 27, 2024, the bank told Trend.
“From February 27, 2024, Halyk Bank stopped servicing MIR cards both at POS terminals and at ATMs,” the bank said.
Previously, some banks, notably Bereke Bank and Freedom Bank,
had discontinued MIR card operations.
Meanwhile, the US Ministry of Finance has slapped sanctions on
Russia's national payment card system. The Russian National Payment
Card System is in charge of the Russian national payment system,
MIR.
Halyk Bank is Kazakhstan's largest bank, with assets of 13.9
trillion tenge (about $31 billion) at the end of 2022, up 19.18
percent from 11.6 trillion tenge (approximately $26 billion) the
previous year. Furthermore, this represents 31.11 percent of the
total assets of the banking system.
MIR is a Russian card payment system for electronic financial transfers established by the Central Bank of Russia by a law enacted on May 1, 2017. The system was created by Belgian digital payments startup OpenWay and is run by the Russian National Card Payment System, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Central Bank of Russia.