Sberbank’s second pirouette

TECH FIRMSHSBC with ropy business models are told to “pivot”—abruptly reinvent themselves in the hope that a new approach generates profits before venture capital runs out. YouTube is celebrated in business schools for hurriedly switching from a dating service to video-sharing; Slack ditched online gaming for corporate chat. Agile repositioning is not confined to Silicon Valley. In Russia the hustle to come up with the next tech darling has emerged from an unlikely quarter. Sberbank, once the Soviet Union’s sclerotic retail-savings monopoly, is ploughing billions of dollars into consumer technology. It is pitching clients digital services from food delivery to music streaming. Driverless cars and e-commerce will be next. Can the former spiritual home of financial bureaucracy, still majority-owned by the government, reinvent itself as Russia’s Netflix, Google and Amazon rolled into one?Bewilderingly, the answer is: maybe. Sberbank has pulled off one long-odds pirouette—from a communist state enterprise, with all the attention to customer care and corporate probity you would expect, into a modern lender. By adopting decent governance standards and up-to-date lending practices it has seen off plenty of rivals and kept nearly half of all retail deposits in the country. Its brand remains strong. The state’s continued involvement—the Russian finance minister chairs its supervisory board—has helped reassure customers that the state will make them whole if things go awry. Two in three Russians are still its clients. The lousy interest rates depositors accept in return for this security ensure cheap funding for Sberbank—and some of the world’s juiciest lending margins. This has made it Russia’s most valuable listed firm, and Europe’s second-most-valuable bank behind .