Banks up conversion fee for plastic card withdrawals
From Jan.11, 2016, while withdrawing money from plastic cards a
conversion fee equal to four percent will be charged, Azerbaijan
Banks Association (ABA) told Trend Jan. 9.
The commission will be charged only during conversion operations
for withdrawing from plastic cards. This measure is aimed at
reducing the cash operations from plastic cards and stimulating
non-cash payments.
"Some bank customers use cards not for their intended purpose, and
us them only in order to cash out their funds," said the source in
the association.
"In recent days, the population began to actively transfer manats
to their dollar cards, and then withdraw dollars and sell them,
which could lead to the emergence of black market. As a result,
other citizens could not cash out their dollar funds from their
cards, since the ATMs were empty within 30 minutes," said the
association.
This decision does not concern the clearing conversion, ABA
said.
"Those who carry out payments (in particular with online purchaes)
from their manat cards or vice versa, would be billed through the
existing conversion tariffs. So the conversion fee for them will be
0.5 percent as before,” ABA said, adding that the new rule doesn't
apply to withdrawals of currency, same as the one on the
account."
The total number of payment cards in Azerbaijan reached 5.679
million units as of Nov.2015, of which 4.59 million units accounted
for debit cards, according to the Central Bank of Azerbaijan.
The official exchange rate is 1,5642 AZN/USD as of Jan. 9.
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