Sberbank, Russia’s national savings bank, has founded a new subsidiary which will act as an MVNO, Vedomosti reported last week. Dubbed ‘SB-Telecom,’ the new company will provide telecom services to companies within the Sberbank group as well as to their end customers. The new company has yet to receive a license from state regulator Roskomnadzor. According to the …
Earlier this month major companies from the Russian financial industry announced the creation of a consortium for joint exploration and project implementation in the field of blockchain and related technologies. Accenture, BINBANK, MDM Bank, Bank Otkritie, QIWI Group and Tinkoff Bank have expressed their intention to join the Consortium. The consortium presents itself as “Russia’s …
Major financial players announce blockchain exploration consortium in Russia Read More
SBT Venture Capital, the venture arm of Russian state-controlled savings bank Sberbank, appears to be among the participants in Uber’s latest equity funding round. Led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, this $3.5 billion deal took place this spring, valuing the US startup at $62.5 billion. SBT’s participation was revealed by BNE Intellinews, an online …
Russia’s Sberbank participated in Uber’s latest equity round Read More
VisionLabs, a Russian startup specializing in facial recognition, data analysis and robotics, announced today that it has secured 350 million rubles ($5.5 million at the current exchange rate) from Sistema Venture Capital. The fund received a 25% stake, valuing the startup at 1.4 billion rubles ($21.5 million). Founded in 2012, VisionLabs has developed a software package, named ‘Luna,’ …
A Russian startup is launching in the U.S. this week to target the lucrative online lending market. Blackmoon launched initially in Russia last June, and has since rolled out into Poland, Latvia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, and Finland. Today, it opens its New York office and will begin the process of integrating with lenders in the …
Russian startup Blackmoon launches online lending platform in the U.S. Read More
Russia’s banking sector is being shaken up by new entrants armed with the latest technology, but the process is proving anything but smooth for some of these pioneers. Just months ago, as reported by East-West Digital News, Otkrytie, a major Russian bank, announced the acquisition of mobile banking startup Rocketbank. Almost simultaneously, Instabank, another mobile banking startup with a strong social …
Pure players and mobile operators shake up Russian banking sector Read More
More than six months after its launch, Russia’s national bank card MIR is already supported by more than a hundred Russian banks, 13 of which actually issue the card, according to the Russian central bank’s subsidiary NSPC (or NSPK), which operates the MIR card. Card acceptance is not ubiquitous yet in Russia, however, if judging by the …
Russian IT firm LANIT has invested $2,5 million in CardsMobile, a developer of contactless payment solutions, in exchange for a 28.6% stake, Russian business daily Vedomosti reported last week. Thus, the company has been valued at $8,7 million. CardsMobile has developed a platform for NFC payments as well as a mobile application, christened ‘Wallet’ (‘koshelek’ in …
CardsMobile secures $2.5 million from LANIT as NFC takes off in Russia Read More
While the most popular online payment methods are online banking and bank cards used online, with 80% and 79% of Russian Internet users, respectively, using these methods regularly, no less than 62% pay with e-wallets. Just 47% utilize SMS-payments. These are some of the key findings of a recently published TNS survey, which was made …
Russia’s national savings bank Sberbank has teamed up with the Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF, or FRII in Russian), Russia’s largest seed and early stage venture fund. FRII will select projects while Sberbank will provide startups with expertise and funding for pilot projects. The money will come from Sberbank itself and its venture arm SBT Venture Capital, launched …
Sberbank and IIDF team up to launch fintech accelerator Read More
Over the past few months Russia’s Central Bank has made several steps to track and get involved in the developments of financial technologies. In February, the bank created a working group to implement fintech innovation in cooperation with market players. Among the fields of investigation of this working group are Blockchain technologies and the way …
Russia’s central bank seeks active involvement in fintech developments Read More
Russia’s federal financial monitoring service, Rosfinmonitoring, has announced that the country will soon have its own national cryptocurrency, according to the newspaper Kommersant. No official proposal has yet been written to this effect, but the idea of a cryptocurrency is being discussed with bank representatives at sessions organized by the Ministry of Finance and the Central …
Russia plans to launch its own national cryptocurrency Read More
