Electronic Payment Systems in the Eastern Europe

This paper analyzes the electronic payment systems (EPS) market in the Eastern European countries. The main objective is to analyze the important and currently most popular electronic payment systems in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, to provide an overview of all the technical, financial and other options that these systems offer, to create comparable characteristics of the analyzed systems and to compile recommendations and helpful instructions for implementing user or merchant solutions. Another objective is to analyze security technologies used by today's EPS, including solutions of related problems and risk reductions, and provide useful recommendations. The paper is divided into three parts: the first attends to analysis of Russian EPS, examines history of development of EPS and the prospects of Russian payment systems market, also provides detailed analysis of currently most popular EPS in Russia; the second section attends to analysis of EPS markets of Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia; in the third part all of the analyzed systems are compared in terms of various criteria and characteristics. The final part of the paper also analyses the issues of EPS security and features methods and ways of solving security related problems. The information provided by the paper can be useful to EPS users and customers, merchants intending to conduct business using electronic payment systems in Eastern Europe, developers and web programmers. The outcome and recommendations of the paper may be used for further analytic, statistical and other purposes