Sberbank announced on its website the creation of a new digital product, a private messenger, which allows Bank customers to communicate not only among themselves but also with employees connected to a network of commercial companies to obtain the necessary advice and to order products and services. Right in the messenger that is integrated with a system of “Sberbank Online”, it will be possible to pay for goods or send money order.
“Our interest in this case is very simple: all payments, all interactions will take place in this platform. We’ll warm up activity, which somehow comes to us in the form of transaction income”, — said “Kommersant” head of services “Sberbank Online” Vladimir Stasevich.
In the message of Sberbank said that one of the most important advantages of the messenger will become the so-called smart search, which will be able to choose for every request as close as possible to the client options based on his location, preferences and transactional data”. For business travelers, the messenger should provide a new tool to service the client requests.
Beta testing a new service, Sberbank plans to start in August 2016, applications for participation are already accepted at a special website. “We invite the participation of users and businesses, including service providers, shops, aggregators and developers. The launch of messenger will also allow us to explore the experience of client communication with the form factor of chat to improve and other digital products of the Bank”, — said the head of the Department of “the Bank XXI” Sberbank Svyatoslav Ostrovsky.
Speaking in 2014 at a meeting of shareholders of Sberbank, its head German Gref said that in the coming years the Bank will have to compete with Google, Amazon, Alibaba, “Yandex” and other “powerful Internet platforms.” “If we fail to connect in our old traditional Bank, though very much modernized over the past five years, new and innovative platforms ability to anticipate new developments in technology, new customer needs, unfortunately we risk being out of the market”, — said Gref, Recalling the words of bill gates, who in 1997 said that the world needs banking, but not banks themselves.
In early January of 2016, the same Gref called the IT infrastructure of Sberbank uncompetitive. “We are very proud of their program of centralization of IT systems, how we have made considerable progress in recent years, has invested huge amount of money. It was the largest and fastest project of centralization of IT infrastructure in the world. But as soon as we built our super data center, all finished, we came to the conclusion that we are completely uncompetitive,” — said the President of Sberbank, said at the Gaidar forum.
