Central Bank of Russia expects to complete assessment of NPCS' market value by end of 2026

ST. PETERSBURG. July 3 (Interfax) - The Central Bank of Russia expects the market valuation of the National Payment Card System (NPCS), the operator of the Mir card, to be completed by the end of 2026, with partial privatization to take place in 2027, Alla Bakina, head of the Central Bank's payment system department, said.

The Central Bank in late September 2025 published a report stating that it would evaluate the advisability and processes for transferring several NPCS services to private sector management. Possible scenarios included the sale of a minority stake or a spin-off of several services. The Central Bank would retain a controlling stake of at least 50% + 1 share when selling a minority stake in NPCS to market participants.

"We can talk about specific proposals once we have a market valuation. Our target timeline is that the valuation will be completed by the end of the year, and then, of course, we have the specific contracts in place, and then we can talk about shares, distributions, and so on," Bakina said on the sidelines of the Central Bank's Financial Congress.

"We are consulting with market participants, including banks, platforms, and tech players. We are seeing quite a lot of interest, so, as the Central Bank governor said yesterday, we think the deal will be completed next year," she added.

Bakina said that the regulator has abandoned the idea of selling NPCS services owing to the technical and architectural complexity of the process, and therefore partial privatization would take place through the sale of a block of shares.

Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina July 2 announced that no more than 5% of NPCS shares would be sold to a single participant as part of the partial privatization.

The Russian government created NPCS in 2014 after the imposition of a series of sanctions against Russia. NPCS announced the issuance of the first Mir cards in December 2015. NPCS also processes transactions for cards from the Visa and Mastercard international payment systems, which simultaneously announced suspension of their respective operations on the Russian market in March 2022 owing to the Ukraine situation. The Central Bank is the sole shareholder in NPCS.