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bne Tech
April 5, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 25
North Macedonia’s citizens spent €133.7mn on online purchases in 2018, up 17.8% y/y
bne IntelliNews
Citizens of North Macedonian spent a total of €133.7mn on online purchases in 2018, up 17.8% from a year earlier.
This indicates that confidence in e-commerce and online shopping is increasing in the country of 2.1mn people. However the growth is slower than a year earlier when it stood at 21%.
Due to the limited offer of online products and services in North Macedonia, most of the
transactions were with online stores abroad which accounted for 64% of the total value of online transactions, Fokus magazine reported on April 1 citing central bank data.
The remaining 36% of the value of transactions went to local online shops.
The number of bank cards totaled 1.841mn at the end of 2018, 0.4% up from a year earlier.
Online bank TCS unveils Russian supercomputer Kolmogorov
TCS Group of Oleg Tinkov operating Russia's only pure online bank Tinkoff Bank reported creating its own supercomputer Kolmogorov, named in the honor of great Russian mathematician, the group said on April 1.
Kolmogorov is a conglomeration of data processing servers linked by high-bandwidth connection, forming a single system that simultaneously tackles one specific taks, unlike cloud systems that deal with multiple tasks with dispersed processing capabilities. Tinkoff will use the supercomputer to launch predictive analytics based on data collected on the clients.
Russian banking sector is on the forefront of de- veloping systems based on biometric and other data. In the end of 2018 Russia's largest bank Sberbank said it plans to buy the Center of Speech Technologies (CRT) speech recognition developer from Gazprombank-affiliated compa- nies for RUB5bn ($75mn).
The speech recognition technology could contribute to its own customers' biometric platform that would compete with the United Biometric System (EBS) launched by the Central Bank of Russia (CBR).