MegaFon Bank Card / MegaFon Blog

The amount of available funds to pay for electronic (and not only) services and banking operations is growing every year. Now almost every major IT company has its own e-wallet services (Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Yandex.Money, WebMoney, Money Mail.ru, Rambler.Money, RBK Money, QIWI and others), not to mention the number of banks.

Each of these systems requires registration, and for such routine operations as withdrawing funds to a card or withdrawing cash, additional verification of identity may be required. To transfer funds to any partner or friend, it is ideal to have an account in the same bank or an account in the same system to make this payment with minimal fees and as quickly as possible.

Our new card from MegaFon is called upon to solve such problems and make the process of transferring funds more convenient and faster. The only thing you need to get it is to be a MegaFon subscriber.

Maxim Potapov (IT Financial Services MegaLabs) and Andrey Vengerov (Marketing Financial Services) will tell you more about the new project.

Idea of ​​creation

When creating a card, we were guided by the vision of the subscriber's account as a full-fledged payment instrument. That is, in fact, the funds in the subscriber account again become liquid. These are not just any credits made to the account that provide you minutes of conversation, the number of SMS or megabytes of traffic.




This is exactly the money for which you can buy a cup of coffee in a cafe, pay with it at any store that accepts cards, or transfer it to someone else's account (subscriber or any bank). In general, you can handle the funds in your account as ordinary money. You put 1000 rubles on the phone - and that no longer means that this thousand is just for communication services. This is still your thousand rubles.

At the moment, we are the first in the world to launch such a technology.

One of the main problems of such a bundle is that mobile billings usually simply do not keep up with processing. But we were able to overcome this during development.

Development

The beginning of the transition from an established idea to development dates back to the middle of 2015, at which point MegaFon, MegaLabs and a partner bank (Bank Round) begin to create a single bundle for banking processing, mobile billing and a mobile application from which you can manage all this. Already now we have ready mobile applications for popular platforms - iOS and Android.


One of the main difficulties here was the integration of all this in a very short time - a year for everything about everything.

Of course, when developing a solution of this level, it is impossible to avoid other technical nuances.

For example, MasterCard and other payment systems have clearly regulated time for all operations. That is, the whole chain “Entering a PIN code at the checkout - store - store acquiring bank - payment system - Round bank - debiting funds from billing - the answer is in the opposite direction” should be stacked at this time. This is about 12 seconds.

Due to the fact that billing of operators does not work like processing, at the very start we had many cases when billing just didn’t have time to write off funds, and due to a timeout the operation was rolled back.

Therefore, we had to rebuild the system of debiting funds specifically for working with the card. In fact, we transferred her work from a mobile commerce system to a system similar to calls. For example, when you make a call from a mobile phone, funds are debited from you right away - we also had to do it for the card.

It is worth mentioning the interaction between bank processing and our billing. Under the current scheme of work, the funds themselves are not stored in the bank - they are on the personal account of MegaFon's subscriber. And the processing of the bank here plays the role of transit, and it turns out that any operation you carry out on the card is a debit of money from MegaFon’s billing.

Given the diversity of billing across branches, it took about 5 months to set up the system. In addition to the speed of processing payments, it was necessary to build a service system. We have developed IVR for customers with automatic PIN code generation.

Another situation is a refund to the card if you bought something with its help, but decided to return the product back to the store. Again, because the funds are not in the bank, but in the personal account of MegaFon, respectively, the return is also made to the drugs. And the return chain on the same day of return already looks like "MasterCard - Round Bank - crediting to MegaFon's personal account."

The result of all this work was a kind of symbiosis of telecom billing and processing, each of which solve their own problems.

MegaFon Bank Card

Perhaps the main thing that should be noted right away is the usual and familiar MasterCard, with the only difference being that you need to be a MegaFon subscriber to receive it. The procedure for obtaining a card takes about 5 minutes.

By the way, one subscriber can issue up to 10 different cards for his account. This can be useful if you want to distribute these cards to children and control their expenses on them (you will receive an SMS notification about each operation), or, for example, buy something on the Web, but don’t want to shine the data your main card.

If you are a subscriber of a tariff plan from the All Inclusive line, then the issuance and annual maintenance of a card will be free of charge for you. Regardless of whether you order one card in the cabin, five or ten.

If you have a different tariff plan, then you only need to pay for the card itself (99 rubles for a Standard card and 249 for Gold). Card service at other rates is also free. Like SMS notifications.

The type of cards issued by us differs slightly depending on the region where the subscriber lives (this is due to the readiness of the city infrastructure for the universal acceptance of contactless payments). For example, for Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan, by default, a card with Paypass is issued (both Gold and Standard). For other cities, subscribers can choose between Standard (without Paypass) and Gold (with Paypass). To clarify, Gold cards in such cases are available on “All Inclusive M” tariff plans and higher.

Interest and Cashback

We charge 8% per annum for the balance of more than 500 rubles and up to 200,000. Interest is credited once a month subject to one condition - at least one transaction must be made on the card this month (there is no minimum transaction size, you can spend at least 1 ruble per month).

That is, having 10 500 rubles in your monthly account every month, you will receive 800 rubles in annual interest.

Cash can be withdrawn from the card at any ATM for 2.5% of the withdrawal amount. You urgently needed to withdraw 1000 rubles from your mobile account in cash - and for 25 rubles this can be done at the nearest ATM. At the same time, there is no minimum amount of commission (for example, 100 rubles) or a withdrawal threshold - there is no need to remove a minimum of, say, 3000.

As for the transfer of funds to the account of this card, the whole thing is simplified by the fact that you can transfer them not to the card number (so that other banks do not take interest for this), but to replenish your (or recipient's) telephone account from any other bank account. For this, usually do not take commissions.

Even when you are in Moscow, you can transfer money to a relative in the Far East by simply replenishing your mobile account with the required amount, without commissions. Of course, if the relative is our subscriber who received the card.

Well, and where without cashback, if it comes to a full credit card. We return to the card up to 10% of purchases from our partners. Of course, non-bonus points, minutes and so on are returned - money that you can spend on anything is returned.

Use cases

A card can be a good addition to the cards you already have. It can be used wherever you would like to indicate your salary or credit card details.

For example, bind her data to the taxi call application, use it for purchases on the Web and on trips, pay for freelancers (or accept payments on the card if you are freelancers yourself), quickly transfer funds to friends and relatives. Or give a card to a child so that he learns how to handle them.

Yes, and the urgent question - to go negative on such a card does not work - a card can be paid only if there is a positive balance in the account.

We will be happy to answer your questions in the comments.