National Bank of Tajikistan Selects Compass Plus' TranzWare for National Processing Centre
National Bank of Tajikistan has selected Compass Plus’ TranzWare platform to build its national processing centre. The bank 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 Tajikistani somoni 349m (approximately US$ 72m), an increase of 150.6% and 123.1% respectively. 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.
Ikhtiyor Rakhimov, project manager at the National Bank of Tajikistan, said: “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.”