Payment systems

The card payments of Bulgarians abroad around the Orthodox Easter, which was celebrated between April 9 and 13, recorded a 21 % increase compared to the same holiday period last year.

This was announced by the representation of Visa Europe in Bulgaria, daily Dnevnik reports.

The Athens Stock Exchange will not be opening today since the TARGET2 system (an interbank payment system for the real-time processing of cross-border transfers throughout the European Union) is closed due to Catholic Easter.

By Evgenia Tzortzi

Lotteries with rewards for receipts collection by taxpayers, which could even include cash prizes, as well as free drinks and tickets to events and museums for tourists visiting Greece are among the incentives proposed by the General Secretariat for Public Revenues to combat tax evasion by promoting the use of electronic transactions.

Facebook has recently unveiled a new feature that promises to make users' life easier, by allowing them to send money to each other through the company's standalone app, Messenger.

By Thanos Tsiros

Tax inspectors will soon have full online access to all bank account transactions going back 10 years, as a Finance Ministry decision set to be issued in the coming days will effectively abolish any sense of bank privacy when it comes to the tax authorities.

According to newspaper “Ta Nea” a team of Greek government officials is considering the possibility where consumers will only be able to pay for transactions with a Debit card –not a credit card-, connected with the salary or payments of each consumer.

BELGRADE - The new payment services law will bring significant improvements, creating a legal basis for boosting competition in the payment services market, the National Bank of Serbia (NBS) has said in a statement.

International bank HSBC said on Nov. 13 that its operations in Turkey had been hacked and the personal data of some 2.7 million customers’ credit cards had been compromised, while confirming that no risks had occurred.

HSBC Turkey identified the attack last week through its internal controls.

The electronic billing system has saved 650 million Turkish Liras ($293 million) of extra costs and prevented 100,000 trees from being cut, Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek has announced.

Turkey’s banking watchdog has returned to allowing payment of jewelry and gold via credit card in up to four installments, after a ban on installments that lasted around one year, according to a regulation