The National Bank of Ukraine has defined and listed systemically important, socially important and important payment systems in Ukraine
The NBU breaks down payment systems by categories of importance in compliance with the international practice to harmonize oversight of significant payment systems with a large share in the market in line with the PFMI.
Monitoring of the performance of payment systems in 2019 shows that:
- The System of Electronic Payments (SEP) of the National Bank of Ukraine remains the only systemically important payment system in Ukraine
- The list of socially important payment systems has not changed, as compared with 2018.
The following five payment systems were verified as socially important payment systems:
- MasterCard International Incorporated, the USA
- Visa International Service Association, the USA
- Western Union Financial Services Inc.(the USA)/Western Union Network, SAS (France)
- FORPOST (now – NovaPay), Post Finance LLC.
- Wire Transfer, Ukrposhta PJSC
- Within the category of important payment systems, InterPayService PJSC (Zaporizhzviazokservice PJSC) lost its status of an important payment system after 2018. On the other hand, FLASHPAY (BANK FAMILNY PrJSC) joined the category.
Thus, important payment systems include:
- MoneyGram Payment Systems Inc., the USA
- City 24, Feniks Financial Company LLC
- FLASHPAY, BANK FAMILNY PrJSC
- RIA, Continental Exchange Solutions Inc, the USA
- INTELEXPRESS, Microfinance Organization IntelExpress JSC, Georgia.
The NBU sets tighter requirements to operators of those payment systems included in the importance categories. The requirements cover the issues of governance and management of activities, access and membership policies, risk management system, settlement finality, cyber robustness, and business continuity.
Besides, in January 2020, the NBU introduced the procedure and criteria for identifying significant payment service providers.* Based on monitoring in 2019, Ukrainian Processing Center PrJSC and TAS LINK LLC were identified as significant payment service providers.
To those payment service providers identified as significant, the NBU applies stricter requirements for ensuring business continuity, based on PFMI.
For reference
The NBU classifies payment systems into categories of importance annually, based on payment systems’ performance in the previous year.
The criteria of payment system importance include volume of transactions and types of services provided by payment systems.
*NBU Board Resolution No. 11 On Amendments to Regulation on Supervision (Oversight) of Payment Systems and Settlement Systems in Ukraine dated 21 January 2020.