24 years ago in Russia, payment cards already existed and I was working at a processing center. Quite an interesting experience. There’s virtually nothing on the topic when you google it, so it’s worth leaving it here for posterity.
This was around 1998-1999. Times were tough, as they say, although everything seemed to breeze by for me. An RGRTA student, dorm life, guitar, beer, parties. Somehow, I ended up working as an engineer at KB Stankobank, in the UnionCard processing center. The setup was this: there were about 50 retail points accepting UnionCard. Additionally, there were about 20 companies (factories), where such cards were used to pay salaries or part of them (“payroll project”). Otherwise, they’d receive nothing or get paid in factory products. And I did everything there—from touring the factories explaining from rostrums why and where they could buy food with this piece of plastic. I visited stores explaining to cashiers how to accept these cards and set up terminals. And in our office, servers stood along the wall, and every so often, something needed to be done on the consoles. The servers ran something under Novell Netware (By the way, the company’s name Novell was suggested by the founder’s wife, who mistakenly believed that “Novell” meant “new” in French).
So, the scheme was like this. A customer comes into a store with a card. The cashier calls the call center number. Well, not so much a call center as just dialing our office, where two girls worked. The cashier reports the card number and the amount. The girls confirm that there’s enough balance. The cashier sells the product, and the girls mark it as sold. There were also “slips” and an “imprinter.” Basically, an imprinter is a plastic contraption into which the card and a “carbon copy” slip were inserted, and with a swish-swish, the card number was printed under the carbon copy. The embossed card number is still seen on cards today, although probably no imprinters exist anywhere. The transaction is marked as pending, and then the bank waits for the slips from the stores. Once a slip arrives, the pending transaction becomes complete. At least 50,000 cards were issued.
Essentially, the store sells, say, conditional eggs and bread to a person, and the bank becomes indebted to the store for the eggs and bread. This is where a company called FPK Invest comes into play. Owning everything from a security firm to media assets, this company would supply stores with, say, flour to cover the debt. They traded this flour for machines. And those machines were provided by the very factories that would have liked to pay their workers with them, but since the machines were heavy, workers resisted. Indeed, happiness for everyone. This was called “mutual offset.”
Union Card, despite its foreign name, was a project of the Samara company “Processing Center Union Card.” At one time, many banks were part of the network, and ours was one of them. Later, they were bought by “National Credit Cards,” and then merged with China’s UnionPay. In short, it’s gone into the past. Hardly anything can be googled from the 1999 version anymore.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 