"El Djazair Travel Card" Unveiled for Faster Payments

Algeria has fundamentally transformed its international payment card infrastructure by fully internalizing the design, technical conception, and encoding of Visa and Mastercard products. This significant national initiative, led by the Bank of Algeria, culminates in the introduction of the "El Djazair Travel Card," a unified national standard aimed at enhancing both efficiency and security for Algerian citizens engaging in international transactions. This strategic shift marks a decisive moment in the country's modern financial history, ending a long-standing reliance on external operators for the production and parameterization of these essential payment instruments.

The new system promises a dramatically reduced delivery time for international payment cards, with the Crédit Populaire d’Algérie (CPA) reporting a compression from approximately fifteen days to just forty-eight hours. This accelerated process is made possible by the Société d’automatisation des transactions interbancaires et de monétique (Satim), a public entity that has secured double international homologation from both Visa and Mastercard. This accreditation permits Satim to personalize physical cards and process transactional data directly within Algeria, bolstering national independence and ensuring the absolute protection of sensitive financial information by localizing the most critical link in banking security. The project was executed using entirely local engineering expertise.

The internalizing of card production and data processing is expected to alleviate the administrative and financial burdens previously placed on Algerian banks, which included foreign currency invoicing and cross-border fund transfers. While Satim operates as the technical arm, individual commercial banks will maintain autonomy in client relations and card commercialization. The initiative has seen successful testing phases with the CPA and is now progressively expanding to include the Banque extérieure d’Algérie (BEA) and other public institutions, with an initial goal to issue nearly one million cards. Furthermore, this achievement positions Satim with the ambition to develop into a regional hub for expertise in payment systems.