By Andrei Skvarsky.
According to the chief executive of Russia’s biggest lender Sberbank, Russian banks face no serious competition from small and medium-sized financial technology companies.
The main objective of a typical fintech in that category is to develop and test out a new technology and then sell itself to a bank, Herman Gref told a news conference in Moscow on June 8 in reiterating a point he had made at a news conference in the Russian capital city a year ago.
He was answering a question from EmergingMarkets.me whether the situation had changed over the year. He argued that this was a trend that would stay in place for at least a few years.
But larger fintech companies are “more of a danger for us”, Gref said. He had said as much at the 2018 news conference, at which he explained that big techs “have a lot of money, a lot of clients, and they’re a lot faster”.
According to Gref, who was Russian minister for seven years before taking the helm at Sberbank in 2007, big fintechs are not too good at banking, and at the June 8 event he argued that what he saw as competition between them and banks is about whether the techs will be quicker to master banking than the banks to master new technologies.
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