OREANDA-NEWS. January 10, 2012.  The largest bank of South Caucasus , OJSC "International Bank of Azerbaijan " has announced reduction of tariffs for bank payment cards.

Head of the Bank’s press-service Rauf Agayev has reported that starting from 9 January, new tariffs are applied in the bank for annual servicing of bank cards.

" The reduction concerned such cards as Visa Classic, Visa Gold, Visa Platinum, MasterCard Standard, MasterCard Gold, MasterCard Platinum, as well as Visa Business-MasterCard Business and Visa Business Gold. Depending on types of cards and their validity period the prices have been reduced from 60% to 170%. For example, cost of Visa Classic card for 1,2,and 3-year period will make AZN 25,40 and 50 respectively instead of AZN 40,76 and 112",- R. Agayev said.

The necessity for paying insurance deposit, earlier applied for some types of cards ahs also been cancelled.

R. Agayev reminded that the bank already held discount campaigns for bankcards last March. At that time the campaign caused wide response among the population and the number of appeals for purchasing cards considerably increased compared to  usual period. Taking this into account the bank made a decision on reduction of prices for cards.

" In accord with the Presidential decree from 9 December 2004 , State Program on Improvement and development of modern electronic payment system was approved in Azerbaijan. And that gave impetus for development of favorable conditions for large scale reforms in improvement of payment services. From the moment of program adoption Azerbaijan has succeeded in  improvement of plastic cards market through distribution of pensions and different allowances and premiums on plastic cards as well as salaries to budget organizations’ employees.

International Bank of Azerbaijan attaches special importance to development of card business. It is known that development of cashless payments with use of plastic cards is of general economic importance and one of the IBA’s main directions ",- R. Agayev said.

Following 2011 the number of IBA clients’ active cards made 1.858 million units ( a little over 1 million of them – social and pension cards). In 11 months of the last year number of card operations with all the bank cards was 19.7 million transactions for about AZN 2.8 bn. In 2002 IBA had 28.000 cards and the turnover of card operations was USD 71 million.

At present the bank’s card servicing network consists of 629 ATMs, 65 kiosks and 3757 POS terminals.