The National Bank of Serbia ( NBS ) has signed a strategic agreement with the American company Discover, which increases the global acceptance of the card of the same name, but also non-cash means of payment with Diners Club International PULSE and Network Alliance in the DinaCard acceptance network. The Central Bank assessed that this represents “an important step in the expansion and modernization of the domestic card system”.
In addition to the already possible acceptance and expansion of the acceptance network for the Chinese national card system UnionPay , this agreement represents the first contactless transactions with the DinaCard-UnionPay card performed at the point of sale at the end of January this year.
“These contactless payments were made as part of a pilot production conducted by the National Bank of Serbia with the Postal Savings Bank and the UnionPay card system, which includes the issuance of a limited number of cards with contactless payment and cash and cash withdrawal transactions,” the statement said.
By the end of the year, the issuing banks are expected to start mass issuing the joint DinaCard-UnionPay card.
At the end of the first quarter of this year, the total number of issued payment cards in Serbia is over 10.2 million, which is 6.3 percent more than in the same period in 2021, or 87,000 cards more than at the end of the fourth quarter of last year.
In the first quarter of this year, over 97 million payments were made in Serbia with plant cards, which is an increase of 22.4 percent compared to the number of payments in the same period last year.
Also, more than 5.6 million card payments were recorded by foreign payment service providers in our stores, which is 53.1 percent more than during the first quarter of 2021.Â
Such a movement was expected, due to the normalization, first of all the catering and tourism, but also other movements on the market, Nova Ekonomija reports.
