Awards for Excellence 2016
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The past three years have not been kind to Russia’s consumer lenders. The end of the country’s long consumer boom and its rapid slide into recession have sent bad debts soaring across the sector and pushed leading players such as Russian Standard Bank and Home Credit Bank into heavy losses.
The only player to have avoided this blight is Tinkoff Bank, the winner of this year’s best digital bank award for CEE. It has managed not only to post a healthy profit in each of the past two years but also to maintain an impressive pace of growth and innovation throughout the period.
According to chief executive Oliver Hughes, the key to the bank’s resilience has been its online-only business model. In the boom years, lower fixed costs and a focus on credit cards rather than cash loans meant that Tinkoff Bank was able to grow by expanding its customer base rather than – like its branch-based peers – steadily increasing loan sizes. This left the lender with smaller individual exposures when the economic downturn began to bite, as well as a more manageable cost base.