In a year when technology was key to success in banking, Tinkoff Bank’s groundbreaking ecosystem and relentless pace of innovation make the Russian lender the standout candidate for central and eastern Europe’s best digital bank award.
Founded as a branchless credit card issuer at the end of 2006, Tinkoff quickly transitioned into a full-service digital bank, providing retail financial and lifestyle services online and through a single super-app, launched in 2019. Its chairman is Stanislav Bliznyuk.
The bank was thus ideally positioned for the shift to digital banking during the Covid pandemic, as shown by the 25% expansion of its client base to 14.8 million by the end of December. This rapid growth, combined with a highly efficient digital-only business model, contributed to an outstanding return on equity of 40.6% last year.
AI and big data are central to Tinkoff’s strategy and in the awards period the bank deepened and expanded the use of AI in all aspects of its back-office and customer-facing operations.
These include Tinkoff’s groundbreaking voice assistant, Oleg, a new version of which was launched last year. Users can now choose the assistant’s name, voice and gender, and set up instructions to handle different calls from contacts, as well as calls from unknown numbers.
In March, Oleg also became the first voice assistant solution available in Clubhouse, where it can be used by room creators to communicate and moderate discussions utilizing its text-to-speech and speech-to-text capabilities in real time.
AI also plays a central role in Tinkoff’s credit scoring processes, which are based on securely merged data on its oneFactor platform. It includes AI-powered predictive analytics tools based on combined data from multiple sources, such as telecom operators, Russia’s largest credit bureau and Tinkoff itself.
On the cybersecurity front, voice recognition technology and AI helped Tinkoff cut fraudulent activity by half last year.
Other notable launches in the awards period included Investment Box, a micro-investing service designed to take advantage of the newfound appetite of Russian retail clients for stock market investing. Small savings on everyday purchases with debit cards are automatically invested in Tinkoff’s exchange-traded funds. The option saw rapid take up, reaching one million customers by April 2021.
Meanwhile, February saw the introduction of Tinkoff Checkout, an online and offline payment service for businesses. The new platform combines existing payment technologies of the Tinkoff ecosystem and new solutions, including services by CloudPayments, a leading Russian online payments company.
The launch was the latest step in Tinkoff’s drive to capitalize on the rapid growth of the e-commerce market in Russia since the start of the pandemic. In 2020 the turnover of Tinkoff’s internet acquiring business doubled, with the number of active merchants surging by more than 60%.
Tinkoff’s acquiring and payment services are currently used by more than 200,000 companies and entrepreneurs. Its partners include large Russian and international companies, such as online and offline retailers, online marketplaces, brokers and management companies, microfinance organizations, taxi firms, airlines, social media entrepreneurs and various other SMEs and large businesses.
