By Andrei Skvarsky. The Indian subsidiary of Fitch Ratings has assigned its highest credit rating to a 1bn-rupee ($15.5m) certificate-of-deposit programme to be launched by the Indian branch of Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. The Indian subsidiary of Fitch Ratings has assigned its highest credit rating to a 1bn-rupee ($15.5m) certificate-of-deposit programme to be launched by the Indian branch of Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. Russia’s communications watchdog has blocked access to 13 cryptocurrency trading or information websites, citing court rulings. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. Russian companies seeking to do business in Middle Eastern countries and Egyptian firms wishing to work in Russia will receive “extremely extensive” financial support from Banque Misr, a top Egyptian lender that has just opened a representative office in Moscow, the bank’s chairman has said. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender, has become the country’s first bank to join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a nonprofit whose purpose is to coordinate the engineering of an open-source reference standard and a version of the Ethereum trading blockchain that can address the common interests of firms in a wide range of… Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. Russia will soon launch its own cryptocurrency, the “crypto rouble”, the communications minister has said, citing a decision by President Vladimir Putin. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. Russia’s lower house of parliament has announced competitive tendering for a study on cryptocurrencies that would underlie future legislation on digital money. Continue Reading
By Dan Miller, payments officer in the Australian banking sector and contributor to Bizzmark Blog, a business journalism website. During the last 100 years, it became more than evident that occasional market crashes seem to be something that happens fairly regularly in a system controlled by central banks. Because of this, more and more economists speculate… Continue Reading
GUEST POST: Introducing bitcoin for SME payments – 7 tips By Mark Thomasson, business developer at Invoicebus, an online invoicing service based in Macedonia. Making payments on time and without any friction is one of the key elements in the world of business. As the power of the Internet is spreading to various fields, owners… Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. Russian financial services company ITI Group has bought out Walbrook Capital Markets, a London-based multi-asset brokerage that provides access to a range of electronic trading platforms and telephone services. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. Smurfit Kappa, a Dublin-headquartered multinational packaging manufacturer, has boosted its presence in Russia by buying out a Moscow-based packaging producer, according to British financial adviser Moorgate Capital. Continue Reading
By Capitalist Exploits. Hands up if you’ve got kids. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. ITI Capital, a London-based brokerage that used to be a British subsidiary of Russian bank Uralsib, has announced it has hired John Barker, a former head of international at New York-headquartered global institutional equities marketplace Liquidnet, as non-executive chairman. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. Two financial services firms are launching a $200m fund to provide loans to Russian fintech companies in a bid to help a sector starved of financing because of legal constraints. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender, has bought an $80m stake in a syndicated mezzanine loan extended to Russian company O1 Group, one of the biggest owners of Russian non-state pension funds and a manager of commercial real estate. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. Sberbank’s chief executive recently again excluded the possibility of Russia’s biggest lender establishing any presence in Crimea in the foreseeable future. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. CarMoney, a Russian online retail provider of loans secured on motor vehicles, has reported rapid business growth for the little more than a year it has existed as a rebranded company. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. Moscow Exchange, the company managing Russia’s main securities, money and precious metals exchange, has expressed satisfaction with its own corporate performance last year and with the volumes of trade it hosted in 2016. Continue Reading
With Brexit being a serious challenge to bankers, the extensive agenda of this September’s planned 7th Annual Risk Management Forum in Vienna includes a session on what the conference organisers describe as a “new generation of risks” posed by Britain’s planned 2019 secession from the European Union. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. ITI Group, an emerging markets brokerage focusing on technology and algorithmic trading, has bought a London-based brokerage from Russian financial corporation Uralsib. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender, has hired ex-Societe Generale banker Alexei Poliakov to head the unit at its corporate and investment arm, Sberbank CIB, for sales of fixed-income instruments and derivatives to financial institutions in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. A 2016 survey by Moscow-based property broker Tranio suggests that, among Russians and other Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) nationals buying real estate abroad, the proportion of those doing this as a form of investment has grown significantly since 2014. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. The Ukrainian central bank has urged the police to make nationalist rioters stop forcibly disrupting the business of Ukrainian outlets of Russian state-controlled banks that have had sanctions imposed on them by Kiev for alleged support for Ukraine’s Moscow-backed separatist industrial east, and to prevent them from vandalising the lenders’ offices. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. Two Moscow-based employees of the customer service of Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender, are accused of stealing 40m roubles ($700,000) from one of the bank’s clients. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. In a fresh sign of waning hopes in Moscow of a rapprochement with the United States, a top Russian diplomat has slammed “ill-wishers” in the US Congress for a plan to put Russia under “something like an economic blockade”. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. Yandex.Money, a key Russian online payment service co-owned by Russia’s biggest lender, Sberbank, has hired Ivan Glazachev, a former top manager at Russian Standard Bank, as its chief executive. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. In a survey by Aton, one of Russia’s oldest investment companies, 76 per cent of more than 100 Russian institutional investors said they thought the West is unlikely to soften its sanctions against Russia. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. On top of having been at the centre of a money-laundering scandal that forced the parent company to pay large fines to British and US regulators in January, Deutsche Bank’s Russian subsidiary has received a 10bn-rouble ($174m) backdated tax bill from the Russian government. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. More than 80 per cent of buyers of the stock sold in the current highly successful initial public offering (IPO) of shares in Russian children’s goods retailer Detsky Mir were foreign investors, according to Sberbank CIB, a co-book runner of the sale. Continue Reading
By Andrei Skvarsky. At least 16bn roubles ($2.4m) was taken out of Russia last year through a simple money-laundering scheme that had a practically unchallengeable cloak of legality over it due to the manipulation of the country’s arbitration courts, according to Russian business daily Kommersant. Continue Reading