pitiably I used to complain about “bureaucracy” all the time. I was trying to bring new technologies to Sberbank, and at every step I was slowed down by procedures that either did not apply or did not exist. And when they were applicable and had to be executed, another level of organisational resistance intervened, the “bureaucrats” […]
Tag: Sberbank
On Open Innovation
My conversation with Dimitrios Salampasis, an open innovation researcher (@dsalampasis) What does open innovation mean for the financial industry? For a corporation, adopting open innovation means understanding that there are a lot of ideas in the ways of doing things, processes, technologies that will not necessarily come from the company. For large corporations, and most banks […]
Magical Thinking?
Many things in life are quite difficult to understand, a long list that is getting shorter through scientific advances. But after thousands of years of living in a complex world that we mostly did/do not understand, we have developed various coping mechanisms, magical thinking being one of them. From Wikipedia, magical thinking “is the attribution […]
Sberbank Is Investing In The Future Of Banking
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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,” […]
Technology Innovation in Russian Banking
My interview with HBR Russia has just been published. Here is the English translation (the interview was conducted in English, translated to Russian and back to English, hence some awkward phrases…) What features of the Russian market do you see as important from the standpoint of innovation development in the banking sector ? First […]
Sberbank 2.0
I have been interviewed recently by Tatiana Naumova for a Russian investment magazine. Since the interview will be published in Russian translation, I am including here the (slightly edited) English transcript. 4 main directions for innovation in Sberbank this year – in our interview with the Director of Technology Research Center Dr. Mircea Mihaescu. Author […]