head-on An interview about Sberbank Ventures with Mircea Mihaescu. (Translated from Russian. Original version at http://futurebanking.ru/post/2407) Sberbank Ventures Fund When was Sberbank Ventures Fund founded ? How big is the fund and what is the purpose of its foundation ? The Fund was founded a year ago (in 2012). We started investing in the summer of 2013. The […]
Category: FinTech
An interview for “Piata Financiara” Romania — on bank branches, cloud, 2008, 2014
On branches vs online services We see here the dynamics of a field being fundamentally disrupted by technology. The growth of broadband internet access, cloud computing and mobile devices/smartphones have made possible technology solutions that allow banks to deliver the same and better services to their customers without requiring a visit to the branch. Even […]
Digital Sberbank
Thoughts on becoming a digital bank, from a long internal discussion — edited for brevity There is a large wave of technology transformation that is impacting business after business, and we see it challenging the status quo in banking and financial services. This wave is composed of technologies that are changing the way we create, […]
The role of “head of innovation” — a virtual roundtable for the EFMA Journal
How important is innovation in today’s operating landscape ? To say that it is “critical” would be an understatement. It has been proven, throughout the history of business, that only those companies that master the innovation process are able to survive and even thrive. I like to say that even if you do not care […]
Moving Forward, Fully Armed
I have been interviewed by IT Vision Moscow in December 2012 — this is the edited translation Sberbank Technology Research Center has been functioning for more than a year. Mircea Mihaescu, Director of the Center, is telling us about the results and plans for future. IТ-Vision : What does Sberbank Technology Research Center do […]
Sberbank — Technology Innovation and Investing in Startups
This is the translation to English of my interview with Igor Kostylev @igorkostylev published at here. Q : How long has the innovation center of Sberbank being working, how many people are there ? A :Today there are15 people in the team, apart from me and my assistant. Most of them were hired as project managers, but in […]
Innovation Metrics For The Scared And Scarred
It seems that everywhere I look, there is a magazine article, or an add, or a conference about innovation. I know it is my professional bias, similar to new parents that start noticing all those babies around them as soon as they have theirs. According to Google Trends, interest in “innovation” peaked in 2004, but […]
Judo, Samurais, and Innovation
Last week I attended the Innotribe sessions at Sibos in Osaka. The event was full of excellent, mind-bending sessions, and ended with the Startup Challenge finale. At the beginning of the conference, Innotribe used the judo metaphor to support their thoughts about the principles of innovation. In a nutshell, we were told, judo was based […]
Sibos 2012 Osaka
I am attending Sibos, the international Swift conference in Osaka. After the first day, several themes are becoming apparent. This is a post about “what everybody is talking about”, or at least what I heard… Of course, most people talk sales here, and the amount of business deals and/or discussion about future deals seems impressing. […]
A Short Sibos Interview, Talking About Innotribe Startup Challenge
Mircea Mihaescu, head of innovation at Russia’s Sberbank describes the Innotribe Startup Challenge as providing a “very good snapshot of the state of financial innovation at an early stage”. “There is a clear alignment between what Sberbank considers the best way to discover and apply innovation to the financial industry and how Innotribe sees it,” […]