Alfa Bank Reveals Details of Payment via iPhone Without Access to ApplePay

Alfa Bank's alternative to APPLE Pay will be available only to Mir cardholders. The bank has gained access to the iPhone's NFC chip to restore contactless payments and plans to introduce the solution to the market in 2025

Alfa-Bank's solution for contactless payment for iPhones using NFC chips will only work with cards from the Mir payment system. A representative of the credit organization told RBC about this.

Earlier, Alfa-Bank reported that its developers were able to legally gain access to the iPhone's NFC chip and came up with a way to pay as conveniently as before with ApplePay, only from Alfa-Bank.

"We are currently actively testing it (the solution) and plan to show it to clients and the Russian market as early as 2025. This technology allows for payment by Mir payment system card," an Alfa Bank representative told RBC. He added that the bank plans to make this solution available to all participants in the payment market on an open and free basis. Clients of Russian banks also have Visa and Mastercard cards, but these payment systems left RUSSIA in March 2022, and their cards continue to work only within the country through the Russian infrastructure of the National Payment Card System. Some banks also issue cards of the Chinese UnionPay payment system.

In order to pay using an iPhone, you will need to link the card in the bank's application, explained a representative of Alfa Bank: "The user experience is in many ways similar to the process of paying through bank pay services on Android devices - when the client selects the card that he wants to link for contactless payment via NFC." He added that the interaction of the smartphone with the terminal will use technologies open from Apple.

There are also plans to improve the software package of the POS terminal network of Russian acquiring banks on Android devices, the representative of the credit institution added. "The improvement of the software package of the POS terminal network is needed to ensure the acceptance of payment data on cards using a protocol that is open to developers on iOS," he specified, adding that the same requirements are imposed on announcements of alternative technologies that were previously made on the market.

iPhone smartphones have a technology for contactless payment by cards - ApplePay. To pay this way, you need to link a bank card to the Wallet. Then, to make a payment, you just need to double-click the button without unlocking the phone, select the desired card if several are linked, and put the phone to the payment terminal.

ApplePay and a similar wallet for Android devices, GOOGLE Pay, stopped working in Russia in March 2022 after the start of Russia's special military operation in Ukraine and the introduction of sanctions. For some time, Android smartphone owners still had the opportunity to pay via NFC using the SamsungPay and MirPay apps. But in April 2024 , SamsungPay also stopped working, and MirPay was removed from the official app store after the introduction of sanctions against NSPK in February 2024. Contactless payments using smartphones were popular with Russians before these services left. For example, Russia ranked second in the world in the number of ApplePay users, second only to the United States .

Currently, Russians have access to some banks' own pay services for contactless payments, but they only work on Android devices, as well as payments via QR codes or facial biometrics. In the fall of 2024, NSPK, and then Sberbank, announced that they had developed a solution for payments using smartphones on Android and iOS via Bluetooth. But this technology has not yet been launched en masse.

Sberbank CEO German Gref said that Sberbank had created “all alternatives” so that Apple’s NFC “never returned to the market.” For example, Sberbank launched QR code payments and the biometric payment service “Pay with a smile.” “This was our response to Apple, which suddenly decided to monopolize and play with the NFC port. Now we don’t need an NFC port, we don’t need any devices, we don’t need plastic cards,” Gref said about Sber’s bioacquiring.