Holiday season: Sberbank announced the start of work in the Crimea and Sevastopol

Sberbank decided to enter the Crimean and Sevastopol markets in 2023.

This was announced on Wednesday, January 18, by the press service of the company.

“Sberbank has formed a team and is starting to work on the Crimean peninsula.

The first ATMs of the bank have already been installed, and within a year the network of self-service devices will start operating throughout the peninsula.

Gradually, during 2023, the bank's offices will be opened," the statement said.

It is assumed that in the first half of the year, Sberbank branches will start operating in the largest cities of the region.

At the same time, all the necessary services and services of the bank will be deployed on the peninsula, which was also announced by the governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhaev.

“It's no secret that earlier, in order to issue the same bank card, you had to go to the nearest office, which is located in Taman, the first settlement behind the Crimean bridge.

I know that Sevastopol residents have been waiting for the arrival of Sberbank for a long time, this will allow them to fully use all the possibilities of the bank, ”he wrote in his Telegram channel.

The news about the start of Sberbank's work in Crimea was also positively assessed by the head of the republic, Sergey Aksyonov.

In his opinion, the initiative will have a positive impact on the financial industry and the economy of the region.

“Over the past years, a lot has been done to develop the banking sector in the face of sanctions.

The arrival of such a major player as Sberbank will further improve the availability, speed and quality of banking services for the population, will positively affect the financial and investment climate, the development of the economy and the social sphere,” Aksyonov wrote in Telegram.

It should be noted that after the referendum held in 2014 and the reunification of Crimea with Russia, many enterprises and banks left the peninsula.

Companies were forced to take such a step because they feared the imposition of harsh sanctions from the West.

As a result, only a few credit institutions operated in the region over the next eight years.

Among them are Rossiya Bank, RNCB, Genbank and the Black Sea Development and Reconstruction Bank.

Meanwhile, in 2022, after the start of a special military operation in Ukraine, Western states imposed an unprecedented amount of sanctions against Russian business.

Against this background, President Vladimir Putin called on banks and companies to enter the Crimean market more actively.

“Now there are all conditions for large Russian business structures, which, frankly, used to be afraid of some kind of sanctions, now they have nothing to fear, now they can safely come (including, by the way, banks) to the peninsula and actively work in the region, expand its activities there, opening and mastering new market niches... We will definitely support such business activity, including through the deployment of banking and financial services infrastructure, ”Putin said on March 17, 2022.

Already on April 4, Promsvyazbank announced the start of work in Crimea.

At the same time, Andrey Kostin, head of VTB, announced plans to enter the region's market.

Later, in October, Vladimir Putin approved a deal to bring the Crimean RNCB into VTB, TASS reported.

As Alexei Fedorov, an analyst at TeleTrade, told RT, in 2014 large Russian banks were not ready to work in the Crimea.

If at that moment sanctions comparable in scale to the restrictions of 2022 were introduced against credit organizations, companies and the country's economy as a whole could not withstand such a blow, the expert believes.

“Without a well-functioning SPFS system (similar to SWIFT), a tuned operation of the MIR payment system and a cleared banking sector by the Central Bank, we would have received a severe economic crisis due to the shutdown of the financial system.

Now, Russia’s banking and financial infrastructures are ready for the most severe sanctions, and 2022 has clearly shown this.

The West has already applied these restrictions to the largest Russian banks, so there are no deterrents from coming to Crimea,” Fedorov explained.

According to the specialist, after Sberbank, many other credit organizations can also pull up to the peninsula.

As a result, Crimea will receive the same level of banking services that other regions of Russia now have.

Alexander Razuvaev, a member of the Supervisory Board of the Guild of Financial Analysts and Risk Managers, shares a similar point of view.

“Crimea is now a tasty morsel, because there are few competitors and many potential customers.

Therefore, other sanctioned banks will come here more actively.

In addition, the peninsula remains a tourist attraction zone, where people spend a lot of money during their holidays, and this is additional profit for business, ”concluded the RT interlocutor.