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Comment by hadrien01 | Hacker News Reader

Russia has a home-grown card payment network (Mir) that accounts for 25% of payments. It will probably grow because of the sanctions.

Edit: 25% might be false. Maybe 25% of cards are Mir-only? I'd appreciate if any Russian could chime in to clarify the percentages.

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It doesn't really matter how many Mir cards are—they're just a home-grown Russian brand of a card.

The real issue is that all transactions inside Russia using Visa, MC or Mir are processed inside Russia by the same entity that runs Mir brand, and therefore won't stop working.

Which they created in 2015, after we threatened SWIFT removal for the Crimea invasion, along with a SWIFT alternative called SPFS.

It really wouldn't surprise me if the Russian state fully anticipated and expected these financial sanctions from the West, and have positioned themselves to profit from it after some short term pain.

My understanding is a Chinese payment network is being introduced to pickup the slack.

Which, tbh, was pretty much the stated intention before starting the conflict - cut off the new superpowers and their historic satellite states dependence on [insolvent] western financiers.

Rip the band-aid off and take some hairs with it!

Very. They (China, Russia, India) are calling it "the multi polar world". Knocking swift, visa, mastercard and the dollar out of every country they can has been a goal for years, and now they are handing it them on a plate. Sigh.

Probably just a matter of time until people start to avoid buying China or India products too

It seems mostly to be about oil, plastics and silicon - especially rare earth based silicon.

Commenting more in the sense they are supporting non democratic states. The same way companies/consumers(?) are moving out of Russia, they could reduce spending on products from places that fail at environmental, social, governance and democratic levels (it comes with its own set of problems though)

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