The bank will find borrowers using artificial intelligence

Sberbank announced the purchase of control in the developer of the mobile payment system and loyalty program Platius, as well as in the online advertising platform Segmento, which uses artificial intelligence technologies. The targeted advertising project is also being developed by the American retailer Walmart, where Lev Khasis, first deputy chairman of the board of Sberbank, previously worked.

Sberbank became the owner of controlling stakes in two IT startups. These are the Platius company, which is developing a mobile payment and loyalty system, and the Segmento platform, which uses artificial intelligence and Big Data technologies to target online advertising, First Deputy Chairman of the Board of Sberbank Lev Khasis and the co-founders of the companies said yesterday. They did not disclose the amount of investment and the financial indicators of the companies.

Platius allows visitors to restaurants and shops to pay independently using a mobile application and a linked bank card. Over the past year, the company has doubled its customer base to 2.2 million users. Among the co-owners of Platius are ABBYY founder David Yan and the Innovation Leader Foundation. According to Kommersant's source in the payment services market, the cost of Platius is up to $10 million, and Kommersant's interlocutor at the venture fund agrees with this assessment. Platius will use investments for the development and promotion of the product. Work is already underway to integrate Platius with a number of software products, including R-Keeper. According to Vladislav Dudakov, general director of the coffee house chain Coffee House, in 2014 the company used Platius in all 180 coffee shops: “In less than a year, this provided almost 100 thousand additional visits from loyal customers, whose average bill was 44.3% higher than others.” By 2018, the company plans to connect more than 24 thousand cash registers to its system in various service and retail enterprises and increase the user base to 14.5 million people. “By 2019, the number of mobile payment users in Russia will exceed 40 million people. We set a goal to provide the Platius service to at least half of these people,” says Mr. Khasis. The functionality of Platius is inferior to competing products (Settle or OpenTable), which have a full menu in the application and do not need to enter the code from the receipt to pay, says Igor Pesin, investment director of the Life.Sreda fund. According to the participants in the deal, Sberbank will help the project with access to a “huge network” of enterprises in the hospitality industry.

In turn, Segmento helps build advertising campaigns based on analysis of user behavior on the Internet. The number of profiles in the service database exceeds 250 million, the platform covers 98% of Runet users and allows you to find the right one on more than 1 million sites, including social services, mobile devices and video content. According to IAB Russia, the RTB sector (real-time advertising auctions), in which Segmento operates, grew to 3.8 billion rubles at the end of 2014, accounting for about 20% of the media advertising market. A company manager in the online advertising market estimates Segmento at up to $1 million.

The partnership between Sberbank and Segmento is reminiscent of similar partnerships between American retailers Tesco and Walmart. For retailers, like banks, targeted promotion of services is important, Yandex notes. It is noteworthy that the deal was announced by Lev Khasis, who previously worked as senior vice president of Walmart, recalls Kommersant’s interlocutor in a large Internet company. In the case of Segmento, the added value for Sberbank is that with its help it will be able to target advertising to high-quality, loyal borrowers, believes Nikolai Davydov, managing partner of Gagarin Capital: “Sberbank has a huge audience, half of the transactions in the country go through them - colossal volumes of information, that needs to be processed, Segmento can help with that." The information that Segmento collects about user actions can be useful, for example, for scoring, agrees Rocketbank co-founder Viktor Lysenko.

Roman Rozhkov

Sberbank took into account the experience of Walmart