By Andrei Skvarsky.
Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender, has acquired a 25 per cent stake in PayZakat, a Moscow-based company that has developed and operates a digital system for the collection and distribution of zakat, alms that are obligatory in Islam and are normally collected in cash worldwide.
Chatbots installed by PayZakat in social networks help users to choose projects for donation, calculate how much they would be expected to pay and to make the payments, Sberbank said in a statement.
According to the statement, PayZakat’s technology can prevent donations from being siphoned off for dummy schemes.
All projects and expenditures financed with PayZakat-mediated charity are transparent. The company monitors them in real time and briefs the donors on their status through its chatbots, the bank said.
Sberbank said worldwide zakat collections exceed $500bn per year. Muslims number about 1.8bn worldwide and about 80m in the Commonwealth of Independent States, including Russia, making up one-third of the CIS population.
This leads Sberbank to forecast “huge” eventual demand for PayZakat’s technology.
In Koranic ranking, zakat comes next after prayer in importance.
PayZakat was one of the six startups selected a year ago to receive investments from Sberbank after an accelerator course run by the lender for its employees. The six winners were chosen out of 575 startups that had joined the accelerator.
“This is a milestone. A project developed within Sberbank is becoming part of our ecosystem,” Sberbank deputy CEO Oleg Ganeyev said about the PayZakat project.
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