Sber and T-Bank discussed the further integration of financial and IT companies in the Russian Federation
Top managers of banks together with the leaders of the largest Russian companies — Wildberries, Avito and Aeroflot — discussed the trend towards digital rapprochement. Sberbank’s own session “Business transformation in the interests of the client in the main market industries” was held at SPIEF 2024.
Kirill Tsarev, First Deputy Chairman of the Board of Sberbank. Photo: Sberbank press service
The session moderator, First Deputy Chairman of the Board of Sberbank, Kirill Tsarev, noted that the current stage of development no longer makes it possible to satisfy customer requests with just one company or even an ecosystem. As a survey of session participants and listeners showed – The vast majority uses the services of several large financial and IT companies at once.
«We see a trend towards greater openness of banks — the process of open banking is already being launched, and then perhaps open data. This means that processes need to be built around the client, and not around these companies, in order to make the client experience seamless and convenient and thus combine the services of different companies. This is a completely new format of cooperation,» said Kirill Tsarev.
So, this week Sber and T-Bank (Tinkoff) revealed details about the launch of a pilot project on Open APIs. The project is currently being tested by employees of these two banks, and over the summer it will be scaled to more than 100 thousand clients. Next, access will be provided to all clients. This staged launch is necessary to ensure that all components meet quality standards — from customer experience to security, since the service is fundamentally new.
At the first stage, Sber clients who use T-Bank cards will have the opportunity to see their account and card data, balances and transaction history in the SberBank Online application, and vice versa, in the T-Bank application they will see similar information on accounts in Sber. To gain access to their accounts at a partner bank, the client must agree to provide such access. Banks do not transfer information to each other without the knowledge and consent of the client. Open API technologies use modern methods of protecting client data when transmitting information that comply with Information Security Standards.
At the same time, interaction and cooperation between companies does not exclude competition, noted Alexey Malinovsky, Chairman of the Board of Directors of TCS Group Holding. “But it is very valuable that we are at the stage of development that we can talk about partnership, especially in such sensitive topics as fraud, anti-fraud, and so on. In a sense, collaboration is inevitable – almost all clients have cards from different banks, which means we need to open up to each other,” explained Alexey Malinovsky. This does not mean a complete exchange of all data, especially customer data, noted Kirill Tsarev. First of all, we are talking about establishing communication between banks.
Representatives of e-commerce also agree that it is necessary to be friends and combine services for the convenience of clients. “Wildberries has a fine line between our services and the services of our partners. Our task – provide customers with choice and a clear path to obtaining services. For example, we have 7 payment methods and 35 banks available. At the same time, competition works – the buyer chooses how it is easier, more convenient and more profitable for him to pay. For example, more than 30% of payments are made by us – this is SberPay. Our algorithms are configured so that the client will be in the first place with the payment method he chose,” said the company’s CEO Tatyana Bakalchuk.