Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine has a not-so-secret ambition to enter the financial services market. And while it may sound like a strange idea, the reality is that Yandex has been developing its own financial services for over 10 years now…
Yandex is better positioned than most companies to enter the arena of financial services because of its experience in online payments and banking as well as its impressive suite of free and paid apps for budgeting, managing expenses, setting up savings plans, and more.
The company has very clear plans for where it wants to take its user base and has already made some notable inroads into the market (namely through Yandex Money, its mobile payments solution), and Yandex.Pay.
Yandex have also flirted with purchasing Tinkoff, and at one point had agreed a price, before the deal was called off.
These are all signs of a company that is serious about entering the financial services segment, and with Yandex’s latest (pending) purchase of the Akropol online bank, we can see that they are making serious progress.
So why does Yandex want to enter the financial services market? What Is The Problem That Yandex Are Trying To Solve?
One of the reasons Yandex is so popular with Russian consumers compared to its foreign counterparts is that it offers these users everything they need from one source.
By holding all its different services under one roof, Yandex has simplified life for Russian internet users.
Yandex has also built a strong reputation as a company that offers, an unbureaucratic ‘do-it-yourself’ approach to banking. This makes Yandex appealing to anyone who wants to save money using technology, rather than visit a bank branch. Banks in Russia are notoriously inefficient at performing transactions online (you’ll get charged huge fees for receiving money from abroad) and therefore people prefer to do their banking online.
This would open up new, seamless payment methods for both B2C and B2B Yandex products, as well as provide the company with phenomenal amounts of user spending data that can be used for better product development, market forecasting, and advertising.
