Against the backdrop of a shortage of chips for bank cards in Russia, Sber began to “reimplant” chips from non-activated cards into new ones. This was stated by Olga Maklashina, Executive Director, Head of the Cyber Compliance Department of Sberbank, at the Paymentsecurity conference on payment security.
She explained the decision by the complication of logistics from Europe, as well as the withdrawal of Visa and Mastercard from the Russian market. In this regard, the demand for the issue of cards of the national payment system "Mir" increased, and Russia faced a shortage of chips and rising prices for them.
“Our colleagues from the issuing center came up with a solution that is close to ingenious — the reimplantation of bank card chips, that is, we began to “pick out” chips from cards and insert them into new cards,” Maklashina said.
Only non-activated cards are subject to this procedure, that is, those that customers do not withdraw from the bank after issuance. First, collectors bring unclaimed cards to the issuing centers for storage. Then experts delete data from them and send them to the manufacturer of bank cards, where the chips are “picked out” and inserted into new cards.
About 375,000 non-activated cards accumulate every month. "Reimplantation" of chips will allow Sberbank to save 1 billion rubles this year.