Fourteen years ago, a flamboyant entrepreneur best known for beer and restaurants set up a new kind of financial company in Russia.
Oleg Tinkov’s brainchild, Tinkoff Credit Systems (TCS), eschewed bricks-and-mortar banking in favour of high-volume credit-card business. A remote-only model – which back then meant call centres and couriers – kept costs to a minimum.
Oleg Tinkov comes from a poor family in remote Siberia…
What the firm did spend on was marketing and customer service, both novelties for the Russian banking market at the time.
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