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July 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
banking sector as well. Russian lenders have been using AI in such areas as uncovering fraudulent transactions, debt collection and credit scoring, automatization of call centres with chat bots, algorithmic trade and remote customer identification.
Russian banks compete with digitisation schemes
In late May, the country's second largest bank, VTB, unveiled its digital transformation strategy aimed at becoming Russia's No. 1 digital lender.
VTB intends to achieve the status of the best dig- ital bank in terms of the quality of services, also offering users a full-fledged lifestyle platform for services ranging from health to vacation. This is the same strategy already adopted and partially implemented by Russia’s only purely online bank Tinkoff and the clear market leader in the online banking space.
VTB’s strategy comes as part of a larger digital transformation scheme, which also features offering 100% of products online and moving over 80% of all operations to remote channels by 2023, while completely switching to electronic documents.
Still, VTB is a bit late into the digital game and well behind other lenders, such as Sberbank and Tinkoff, that have already been offering a range of digital services for quite a while, while other major banks are working hard to catch up with the leaders making for an increasingly competi- tive market.
"Over the last three to five years, not only digital monoline lenders, but also state-run banks, have been actively developing," Vladimir Verkhoshin- sky, chief managing director at Alfa Bank, was quoted as saying by Russian business daily Kom-
Among the specific examples is an AI-based system for collecting overdue debt, unveiled last year by Russia's second-largest lender VTB Bank.
mersant. "Overall, the Russian banking sector is among the most advanced ones in the world."
Similar to VTB, digitalization features prominent- ly in the development strategy of leading private- ly-owned Alfa Bank, which is eager to reinstate itself as the country's top digital bank. However, Alfa's efforts won't be focused exclusively on the improvement of its mobile app.
While the app will offer all of the lender's availa- ble products in the most convenient form for the user, there are no plans to go completely digital.
A network of branches will remain but digital technologies are expected to improve the quality of offline services and reduce time required, for instance, for issuing a loan or a credit card.
"[In the future,] a branch office could look similar to what it looks like now, but a new level of digi- talisation of processes will enable servicing cus- tomers far more quickly, while routine operations will be moved to online channels," Verkhoshinsky explained.
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