Sberbank to close foreign-currency and multicurrency Visa and Mastercard cards starting September 1

Sberbank will discontinue servicing foreign-currency and multicurrency Visa and Mastercard cards starting September 1, 2026, TASS and RBC reported.

The bank’s support service said the decision was made because “since 2022, Sberbank foreign-currency or multicurrency cards can no longer be used to pay for purchases abroad or book hotels.”

“The payment system doesn’t matter here — only the currency in which the card was originally opened,” the support service said.

Sberbank had already extended the validity of these cards to 2030. The bank is now warning customers that they will need to close their card accounts and transfer the balance to a savings account opened in the same currency as the card.

After Visa and Mastercard withdrew from Russia in March 2022, cards issued to Russian customers under those networks stopped working abroad. Within Russia, however, they continued to function, and Russian banks extended the cards’ validity or made them open-ended.

In October 2025, Dmitry Dubynin, director general of the National Payment Card System (NSPK, which operates the Mir payment system), said that Russia needs to restrict the use of cards whose validity period has expired because the security certificates on all their chips are no longer valid. In response, the Central Bank affirmed that Visa and Mastercard cards would continue to work.