MOSCOW, June 18. /ITAR-TASS/. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday will chair a conference on matters aimed at bringing into being a national payment card system (NPCS). A report on the work done with a view to creating NPCS will be made by Elvira Nabiullina, Head of the Central Bank of Russia (CBR), a government press service official said.

According to CBR Deputy Head Tatiana Chugunova, the first national payment card may be issued as early as in mid-2015 and it will function in co-branding with the following four payment systems: the Chinese UnionPay, Japanese JCB, and the international VISA and MasterCard. This will ensure an opportunity to pay for purchases abroad with the national card at once. In the process, internal transactions will be processed only by the NPCS.

The national payment system will be built not "from nought" but on the basis of the technological infrastructure of one of operating payment systems. PRO100 and Golden Corona are the main candidates in this respect.

The conference is to be attended, along with a number of government members, by representatives of credit-lending organizations and foremost Russian banks.