“For me the real dynamism in retail is the smaller cities, the frontiers,” says Denis Bugrov, Sberbank’s head of strategy. “Historically banks focused on the big cities. It’s in the big cities where most of the competition is.”
Point-of-sales lending is particularly well suited to serving the smaller towns: at its most basic it just requires a salesperson and a laptop. “We are one of the few banks that works from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka,” says Ivan Svitek, chief executive of Home Credit, a consumer finance specialist with the biggest market share in point-of-sales lending in Russia.
Part of Tinkoff’s success is similarly partly attributable to its use of mail shots, and more recently the internet – as well as a dedicated courier operation – to sell credit to ordinary rural Russians, sometimes even in areas without branches of Sberbank.
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