It took only five months to develop and implement new platform in the Bank's processing centers, manage the migration from the legacy system, pass all certifications with Visa and complete the training of the Bank's operational staff.

Following a competitive bid process SmartVista won the deal for most exactly meeting National Reserve Bank's requirements as a highly functional, flexible and scalable solution. The Bank decided to move from an outsourced model to a modern Open System in-house processing solution to manage its ambitious growth plans for its payment's business, to improve its speed to market, lower the TCO and gain direct control over a strategic line of business. The state-of-art solution runs the Bank's processing and personalization centers in Moscow, covering the Moscow region and Voronezh, covering the rest of Russia. The processing centers will now handle all card management, card personalization, switching and authorization and ATM management.

In the immediate future the Bank plans to widen its range of payment services to include issuing EMV smartcards, e-commerce, i-banking and MasterCard products.

"We are proud to have been selected to play such an important role in supporting National Reserve Bank's strategic shift in its payments business. With SmartVista to run all payment processing the Bank will enjoy a flexible, scalable and low cost payments infrastructure for many years to come," said Vasily Grigoriev, CEO, BPC Banking Technologies.

"The constraints of our original payments infrastructure would not have managed our aggressive growth plans to increase our card base significantly and to expand the range of payment services to our customers We took the decision to assume direct control over our payments business and have been very pleased with our choice of SmartVista and BPC's ability to implement the new solution quickly and seamlessly," commented Oksana Pogodina, Deputy Chairman of the Board, National Reserve Bank