It has been announced today that Yandex have agreed a $5.5bn deal for the countries largest online bank, Tinkoff.
The deal is subject to due diligence and the submission of a formal offer, and will further the disruption of the banking space.
As we know, Yandex is one of the only search engines to have a higher local market share than Google and has recently made a number of investments in modern services such as grocery deliveries, autonomous vehicles, and personal entertainment.
Earlier this year (July), Russian Search News performed an analysis of the Russian financial and banking sector, in which Tinkoff was compared to other consumer banking solutions.
This news also comes days after Yandex branded their product .Money as YuMoney.
The relationship between Yandex and Sberbank has been a tedious one in recent years, as Sberbank’s Chief Executive Gref has spent the past two years pouring billions of dollars into the tech ecosystem, and setting up rival company divisions to compete with Yandex on multiple fronts. This relationship became untenable, and eventually the ecommerce joint venture between Yandex and Sberbank ended, with Gref selling the SB half back to Yandex.
On the flip side, Tinkoff have been lauded for their customer and retail focus, and tech savvy innovations – but have failed to make substantial ground on the market, much as our organic search data suggests from our July study.
The combined forces, and combined market penetration, of Yandex and Tinkoff however could revolutionize the Russian fintech space and how consumers (and businesses) bank in Russia.
