Central Bank's Interbank Card Center infrastructure has been reaffirmed to fully meet international security standards

20-03-2021

19 March 2021, Baku: The Central Bank takes ongoing measures to boost security and resilience of the infrastructure of the National Payment System, one of the priority activity directions of the Central Bank performance.

The Central Bank always attaches great importance to reliable and uninterrupted operation of the Interbank Card Center (ICC)  launched in 2016 to make the card infrastructure more effective and maintain security of payment card transactions. The ICC, created on the basis of modern technological standards, allows to process domestic operations with plastic cards issued by the banks operating in the country in the national network and eliminate dependency on foreign organizations, at the same time, apply an effective and flexible tariff policy in the payment card market.

In 2020 53.2 million card operations were conducted over the ICC, the size of operations amounted to AZN2752 million, USD14.6 million, EUR3.1 million. Total number of operations processed in the system y/y increased by 2.4 times, the size increased by 2 times on AZN, by 42% on USD and by 4% on EUR.

Since the legislation of the country, and the international practice consider payment card data sensitive information, high security requirements are set for organizations engaged in their processing, storage and transmission. For this reason, to ensure security of card data transmitted through the ICC and the highest level of business continuity, the system was audited annually for compliance with international PCI DSS - Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards. As a result of the audit review, it was once again confirmed that the ICC infrastructure fully meets the requirements of the latest PCI-DSS v3.2.1 standards.

To note, the PCI-DSS standards were set by the PCI Security Standards Council  in 2006 and include critical requirements and numerous directives for evaluation of security policies, procedures and regulations on payment cards.