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Comment by f311a | Hacker News Reader

Sber also has an open-source version of GPT-3 for Russian.

Sber is a state-owned Russian bank which is a pretty funny detail given that a lot of banks can't even built a decent mobile app.

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The Sberbank mobile app in Russia is an order of magnitude better than anything I've used in the US. The other large Russian tech and service company apps are very very good (Ozone, anything Yandex puts out). Even the federal services apps are well executed - you can pay your property taxes and other services by scanning a QR code. Some great tech coming out of that country (accusations of hacking, aside).

Sberbank is a joke of a bank, mostly serving older generation who kept using it on inertia from the time it was the only bank you got in the country.

Generally, it's bureaucratic, kafkaesque, and ill, as the country which once made it.

Well, so do 95% retail banks across the globe.

Have you used Sberbank lately? I have a different experience and I'm not from the "older generation". Its mobile app is pretty decent, this year I got a mortgage loan and it went pretty smooth, I didn't notice anything bureaucratic or kafkaesque about it? I'm its client for 4 years now and I'm struggling to remember negative experience with it. They've been having an overhaul lately, maybe it was far worse before. Yeah the cool kids prefer Tinkoff nowadays but it's not true that only old people use Sberbank.

Sberbank CEO (he is a Russian German and has some typical traits making him noticeably different from typical Russian bureaucrat) and his posse is the leading part of the technocratic wing of the political elite in Russia. Their people also lead another important bank - VTB (international payments/etc for large corps), and Sber has strong hold on various national networks, like naturally anything money related, like municipal services and traffic ticket payments for example, as well as on generic network infra and datacenters. If Putin is gone tomorrow there is strong chance that those technocrats will take the power (i haven't noticed any significant animosity between them and FSB which would otherwise be a complication). Particularly important aspect showing their power is that there have been no corruption scandals associated with them, at least not that i can remember in the last decade at least. They tread very carefully, not making any open political claims while presenting themselves basically like apolitical tech-infrastructure/platform for the efficient government and society and doubling down on the source of their shadow power - network/infra/technocracy. Thus they can't allow themselves to suck too much technically, and thus they naturally hire decent technical people (i have some first handshakes among the upper management in technology there)

It's a shitty bank by russian standards indeed, but this has nothing to do with the fact that

>The Sberbank mobile app in Russia is an order of magnitude better than anything I've used in the US.

Even so, they do a pretty good job for a state-backed bank. Better than anything state run I've experienced in the US.

But I agree in principal with you - and from what I hear, Tinkoff is one of the better choices and the founder is well respected.

That's factually incorrect. You are seriously out of date.

Sberbank is by far the most popular retail bank in Russia (over 80% of Russians use its services) and the distribution of the client age is almost uniform. [0] The performance of its stock since 2015 is the best proof of it. [1]

[0] https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ru/Documents/...

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SBER.ME/?guccounter=1

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