Sberbank's investments in technology were twice as high as those of Yandex

In 2014, Sberbank's spending on technology amounted to 65 billion rubles - this is 5% of operating income to reserves, told RBC Lev Khasis, the first deputy chairman of the bank. Khasis noted that “Sberbank is essentially an IT company,” but with a banking license. And the bank will compete with Google and Apple.

Sberbank's operating income for 2014 before the reserves amounted to 1.3 trillion rubles. On IT, the bank spent about 65 billion rubles. The total expenses of Yandex in 2014 amounted to 35.4 billion rubles, of which 78% went to the expansion of data centers.

Banks have information about customer transactions and their financial history, but in most cases they do not know how to work with the data. On the other hand, Internet giants like Google and Apple squeeze the most out of the information received, Apple Pay and Android Pay will give new financial opportunities to digital companies. But banks are learning and will soon begin to compete with them.

For banks, participation in the race for the customer in the digital space becomes a matter of life and death. We can still win in it. To do this, we need to become more flexible, able to quickly bring new products and services to the market, modernize our IT systems, use new business models. We need to change at an even faster rate than our competitors do. It is very difficult, but there is no other way for banks to avoid the fate of dinosaurs. Lev Khasis

Sberbank’s expenditures on technology include project budgets, investment in businesses and IT infrastructure. The bank employs ten thousand IT-specialists - 3% of all employees. The IT-projects are handled by the Sberbank-Technology subsidiary, which develops software and 70% of bank decisions.

The expenses of Alfa-Bank on IT make up 8% of the costs. Unicredit spends on technology 13%.