Yandex.Money, the largest online payment service in Russia, will employ NFC technology to offer users contactless payments from its Android mobile app. Users can now make payments in supermarkets, the metro, and other public places, simply by placing their smartphone up to a POS terminal.
To enable NFC payments, users can simply update the Yandex.Money app on their phones. A virtual MasterCard will be issued to their account automatically; its balance is the balance of the user’s Yandex.Money e-wallet.
NFC payments by MasterCard are currently being accepted by more than 4 million merchants in 74 countries. In Russia, that number is up by 138% in the last year. By 2015, NFC payments were available on more than 600 million smartphones globally, according to the annual report by Deloitte.
Based on Gartner’s research, in 2015, the number of NFC mobile payment users had reached 53.9 million worldwide. A survey by Gemalto и J’son & Partners showed that last year in Russia, more than 60% of users between the ages of 16 and 35 reported that they would like to start using NFC payments.
Yandex.Money is the largest online payment service in Russia, according to a 2014 survey by TNS. Yandex.Money offers consumers easy, safe, and reliable methods of paying online on its own site and mobile app. The service hosts 25 million user accounts with about 12,000 new accounts opened daily. Yandex.Money also offers online stores Yandex Payment Solution for accepting online payments by all the methods most popular among residents of Russia and other CIS countries. Currently, over 76,000 online stores use Yandex Payment Solution.
