Sberbank will create a competitor "Yandex.Avto"

To expand his ecosystem, Sberbank decided to develop his own multimedia platform for cars and hired a team from Yandex.VTO, writes Kommersant. The platform itself almost completely copies the Yandex service.

What's happened?

Almost the entire Yandex.VTO team will work on the project, including its director Andrei Vasilevsky, Kommersant claims - Vasilevsky’s page in LinkedIn says that since December 2019 he became the general director of Sberbank Sberdigitalauto. In fact, besides Vasilevsky, only two people have gone from Yandex.Avto - a total of about 100 people work in a total, the company’s source told The Bell.

According to Kommersant, Sberbank wants to develop a competitor to Yandex.VTO, almost completely coping the idea of ​​an existing service-it is assumed that the platform will be equipped with a voice assistant system (its bank has already been introduced into the OKKO online cinema-cinema submitted on February 18), cartographic service (previously reported that the bank is conducting negotiations on purchase. 2GIS service) and a musical application (this can be the streaming service of Spotify, which is preparing to launch in Russia).

What is important to know

Yandex.Avto, launched in 2017, includes a navigator, Yandex.Musika service, a browser and the possibility of paying fuel from the car using the “refueling” service. Also in the service there is a management function using the Alice voice assistant. Some large automakers cooperate with the service: AvtoVAZ, Renault and Nissan, a partnership with Mitsubishi was prepared.

Sberbank, like Yandex and Mail.ru Group, creates an ecosystem around its customers, trying to surround them not only with financial services. “It became obvious that the financial service is not final, it is always intermediate, and all the owners of intermediate services will gradually be replaced by ecosystems,” said the head of the bank German Gref recently.

The competition of Sberbank with Yandex is a special case: soon, probably, there will be no areas in which the bank would not try to compete with Yandex separately or together with Mail.ru. We wrote in detail about the war of the two ecosystems here . At the end of last year, Oleg Tinkov collapsed with accusations in plagiarism to Sberbank.

What's next

The key task of Sberbank in the promotion of the platform will be partnerships with automakers, and mainly from the segment of budget and the best -selling cars, said Sergey Polovnikov, head of Content Review, Kommersant.

Despite the fact that Sberbank has even more marketing opportunities than Yandex, the interlocutors in the car market believe that Sberbank does not have the opportunity to fully create a similar “Yandex.Asto” product. One of the reasons is that the automakers in general do not want to introduce a device that will take information about their customers.