Yandex is negotiating the acquisition of Acropolis Bank, owned by Evgeny Davydovich , CEO of Svyaznoy Group .
According to sources, the sale and purchase agreement may be signed in the coming days. The current owner of the bank declines to comment, and a Yandex representative only said that the company “is interested in obtaining a banking license and is considering all available options.”
Bank “Akropol” ranks 323rd in the ranking of banks “Interfax-100”. The bank’s assets are estimated at 1.24 billion rubles. The loss at the end of 2020 amounted to about 82 million rubles.
Market participants believe that in fact Yandex is not buying a full-fledged bank, but a banking license; the company has no plans to open branches or issue loans. Yandex may well afford to buy or create a bank: the company has a cash reserve of more than $3-billion. In addition, now it is possible to become a virtual bank based on the infrastructure of a real bank.
We will remind, in the fall of last year, Yandex was negotiating the purchase of Tinkoff-Bank, but the deal did not take place by agreement of the parties.
We also note that in the spring of 2020 Yandex submitted applications for registration of 17 trademarks related to financial services, including: YaBank, YaKredit, YaBirzha, YaBroker, YaVklad, YaKapital, YaStrakhovka, YaSchet, YaPortfolio, YaSberezheniya, YaSaif, YaValyuta, YaTrade, YaAktsii and YaKash.
Last week Yandex launched Yandex Pay, a service for paying for purchases, which allows you to pay online with a bank card linked to your Yandex account.
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