Money made from sealing wax

It is impossible to present the newly created Post Bank as a business project. Then what is it?

The decision to create the Postal Bank ( according to Kommersant, the political go-ahead has already been received) is much more surprising than, for example, the decree already signed by the president on the destruction of sanctioned products at the site of their discovery. The fight against Parmesan is at the intersection of patriotic PR and the interests of law enforcement agencies, for which the administration of smuggling flows is greatly facilitated.

The creation of a Postal Bank is a question worth tens of billions of rubles, which, of course, is now neither the FSUE Russian Post, nor the VTB Group, which will develop the banking business itself at the post office, nor even the state budget. The banking market, including its retail segment, is stagnating along with the entire economy with the obvious prospect of becoming the bottom, and not at all golden.

Meanwhile, Minister of Communications Nikolai Nikiforov, who is expected to head the board of directors of the new financial institution, is extremely optimistic in his assessments. According to him, by 2023 (it’s obviously scary to predict 2024 and beyond), Russian Post will earn about 60 billion rubles from the new project. The source of profit is the infrastructure payment that the Post Bank will pay to the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Russian Post for the right to use an unprecedented network of 42 thousand branches throughout the country.

At the same time, the net profit of the VTB Group in 2014 decreased by 126 times and amounted to 800 million rubles. But this is just for reference. There are fat years, and there are lean years. The question is whether the model of a huge all-Russian bank with an unlimited number of branches and corresponding costs will allow it to fatten in principle.

Banks, including state-owned ones, managed to extract high margins and, accordingly, make decent profits on the balance between relatively low rates on deposits and higher rates on loans - primarily on unsecured cash loans. That is, banks partially absorbed the permanent increase in household incomes against the backdrop of the oil market and the growth of social budget expenditures.

To count on the return of these trends in the medium term, you need to strongly believe in yourself, and also in miracles.

In fact, banks have growth reserves associated with cost reduction, and primarily for line personnel working in branches with the public. Moreover, there is a very obvious way to work this way: transferring as many transactions as possible online, including to portable devices of client users.

This is the main path along which both private banks and Sber, actively directed by German Gref, and VTB-24, are following.

And here the question arises. Let's assume that Nikolai Nikiforov has no experience in banking. But he is not the minister-postmaster, he is the minister of communications, who for several years received flattering press for the best informatization program in Russia (in Tatarstan). That is, he knows what gadgets are and knows how to use them.

He hardly sincerely believes that the business of the past is to put a savings bank in every post office.

But during his time as a minister, he apparently understood well that the problem of the industry entrusted to him could be solved by flooding it with money. After all, even if the problem is not solved, the money, especially personal payments, bonuses and parachutes, will not go anywhere.