The Banker, a monthly international financial magazine owned by The Financial Times Group, named Tinkoff Bank Russia’s ‘Bank of the Year’ for 2017 in its 18th annual awards in London.
The Banker’s editorial team recognized Tinkoff Bank’s success in transforming its business model and diversifying its income sources: «Despite the feeble operating environment, Tinkoff Bank demonstrated that its new financial supermarket strategy is a success story.
Counteracting the impact of the Russian consumer downturn in 2014 and 2015, Tinkoff revamped its business model and diversified its income sources. While maintaining its lead and high returns in the core credit card segment, Tinkoff started developing new business lines under its Tinkoff.ru financial supermarket, which are now increasingly contributing to the bank’s top line.»
Oliver Hughes, CEO of Tinkoff Bank, commented: «The Tinkoff Distribution and Servicing Platform has huge potential for the sale of financial services. A few years ago we set ourselves the goal to unlock this potential by building new business lines and by selling partner products.
We already see that this ‘financial supermarket’ strategy is paying off as we visibly diversify our revenue into fee and commissions. By the end of the third quarter, 22% of our top line came from non-credit business lines. By the end of 2019, 30% of our bottom line will come from non-credit business lines.
Continuously innovating our processes also helps us achieve greater operational efficiency. Just one example of this is our use of voice recognition technology allowing us to save around 720 hours of employee time per month, while using chat bots to field 20% of all incoming queries without having to route to an employee.
I am delighted to see the outstanding performance of the whole Tinkoff team recognised by international experts with the Bank of the Year 2017 award.’’
Tinkoff Bank is the only fully digital lender in Russia and the largest in the world by customer base. It offers financial products and services to all users via its online platform Tinkoff.ru and its award-winning mobile app. Tinkoff Bank is part of TCS Group Holding PLC, which posted y-o-y net income growth of 73% in 9M17, translating into a return on equity (ROE) of 48.8% for 9M17.
In choosing The Bank of the Year Awards 2017 winners, The Banker’s editorial team looked for strong financial performance and evidence of banks setting new standards for their local industries, whether it was by using new technology or coming up with innovative, cost-efficient ways of expanding their businesses.