It will consolidate the existing infrastructure of bank card acceptance in Tajikistan, enabling financial institutions to issue local as well as international bank cards on their own national platform. The national processing centre will provide a reliable platform for card payment processing, and offer access to the latest payment technologies, including internet and mobile banking.

Card payments have increased dramatically in Tajikistan in recent years. In the first quarter of 2011, card holders in Tajikistan conducted more than 818,700 payment operations, totalling 349 million Somoni (approx. US $72million), an increase of 150.6% and 123.1% respectively (National Bank of Tajikistan, 2011). Currently there is only one in-house processing centre in operation in Tajikistan, which is also built on the TranzWare product suite. Other financial institution card programmes in Tajikistan are serviced abroad which is expensive, limits flexibility, hinders innovation and has an adverse effect on the country’s economic development.

The National Bank of Tajikistan needed to address these concerns and bring reliable and innovative payment services into the country thereby accelerating the growth of the card payment industry in Tajikistan.

To enable this growth, the National Bank of Tajikistan has selected Compass Plus’ to build its national processing centre. The centre, which is already being established, will fully satisfy the card issuing and acquiring, switching, settlement and fraud protection of card transactions in the country as well as enable Internet and mobile banking.

Filipe Dos Santos, Regional Sales Director for Europe at Compass Plus commented:

Increasing payment volumes and high processing costs is a difficult dichotomy for any economy. With our extensive experience in implementing large scale projects across the globe, Compass Plus will ensure Tajikistan has secure cutting-edge payment and remote banking technologies to meet t the needs of financial institutions in Tajikistan now and in the future. Existing product localisation knowledge gained from building Agroinvestbank’s processing centre will enable us to implement the project rapidly.

Ikhtiyor Rakhimov, Project Manager at the National Bank of Tajikistan commented:

The tender for the selection of the processing system vendor was conducted with the participation of experts from the World Bank and the offer from Compass Plus was recognised as the best in terms of both price and their compliance with technical requirements. We plan to bring this project into operation as soon as possible, because it is of significant national importance.