How it works: MegaFon card

The last post of our blog was devoted to a new MegaFon product - a bank card. We tried to talk in detail about the service, and nevertheless, in the comments we received many questions about the operation of the card and its use.

In today's post, we tried to examine in more detail the new MegaFon service and answer your questions in detail. Yours Maxim Potapov (IT Financial Services MegaLabs) and Andrey Vengerov (Marketing Financial Services).

What is a MegaFon card?

This is an EMV standard chip bank card that you can use to pay at the box office worldwide.

A card is a tool that gives customers maximum options for using funds in a subscriber account. With a card, you can pay for products at the supermarket, regardless of how much the new terminal is installed at the checkout and whether it is possible to pay for purchases contactlessly. According to the card, you can pay for goods in your favorite online store.

Many of our customers would not mind replacing the card with a special application in their smartphone. But payment by phone has a number of limitations: according to the technical characteristics of the device (the smartphone must be with NFC), according to the version of the operating system. These criteria significantly limit the ability of users to download the application and immediately use it in the nearest store.

The appearance of a MegaFon plastic card is just the first step to the freedom of using money on the client’s personal account. It is logical that the next step will be the ability to pay for purchases directly with a smartphone. But while the infrastructure for receiving payments by a smartphone as a payment instrument is inferior to the infrastructure of payments using plastic cards.

Can I pay with a card?

For now, this is just a bank card. It does not support downloading a transport application of the MIFARE standard, so it is not yet possible to use it as a travel card to pay for travel. But you can pay for the trip with a MegaFon contactless card on special turnstiles to pay for the trip in the metro with bank cards.

According to our data, for users, fare payment with a touch of a smartphone is much more convenient than fare payment with a touch of a card. You do not need to look for plastic media at the bottom of the bag or in your pocket. The phone is most often in our hand, which means you can pay for them quickly and without difficulty.

We are sure that the development of fare services will move in this direction. Therefore, the Troika transport application is integrated into our SIM cards. The Mobile Ticket service has long been available in the Moscow region to all our subscribers.

What account is the card attached to and where is the money stored?

The money is still in the personal account at MegaFon. With the new service, MegaFon subscribers simply have an additional opportunity to use this money.

You can also top up your account by phone number and without commission. But now customers can replenish by credit card number - in this case, the commission depends on the method of making the transfer.

Since the money is kept by the telecom operator, the deposit is not subject to compulsory insurance. The operator does not engage in banking activities, he does not have a Central Bank license - accordingly, they cannot withdraw it.

Precisely because the card account is the personal account of MegaFon’s client, when switching to another operator, the card will cease to function.

How to manage the services?

You can manage your card through MegaFon Bank - a mobile application and web service. According to our research, it is more convenient for users to manage financial services in a separate application, rather than in an application for managing operator’s communication services, so we left the idea of ​​creating a single application with wide functionality.

You can ask your question about using the card by calling 5555 - bank employees will be able to advise the client on all operations. At the same time, offline customer service takes place in MegaFon communication salons: all applications that may be required to fill out (for example, to challenge a transaction), a client can write in MegaFon communication saloon.

How is mobile operator and bank integrated?

Different models for different scenarios have been developed. For example, to pay for purchases with a card, transactions go through a mobile commerce platform. She interacts with the bank, transmitting an individual client identifier (in our case, a phone number). The bank converts it into its identifier and transfers the information to the payment system.

But besides processing, there are operations such as payments from the mobile application and through the website, issuing a PIN code, sending SMS notifications - and for each of these system blocks there are different schemes for integrating the operator and the bank.

How to get a card?

In order to issue a card, you must contact the nearest communication salon. Prepaid card is issued instantly.

Also, right in the communication salon, you go through the mandatory identification procedure: complete upon presentation of a Russian passport and simplified upon presentation of a foreign state passport.

This is a paid service?

For subscribers of the “All Inclusive” tariff plan, a card is issued free of charge and without service commission. For other tariffs, the card costs from 99 rubles, and card maintenance is also free of charge.

By the way, 8% per annum are charged on the balance of the phone account above 500 rubles.

You can familiarize yourself with the full information on tariffs on the website bank.megafon.ru .

We tried to maximize the details that we were not able to explain in sufficient detail in the previous text. If you still have additional questions, you can ask them in the comments, as usual - we will answer them in one of the following posts of our corporate blog.