Yandex has officially announced the purchase of Acropol bank for 1.1 billion rubles. The deal will be closed after approval by the Bank of Russia, the company filed a request for this on April 28.

The main purpose of the purchase for the IT company is to obtain a universal banking license, on the basis of which it will be able to develop its own financial services. According to the experts who discussed the upcoming deal, Yandex’s further steps in the FinTech segment are still unclear, since the company does not have a ready-made team for developing in this area.

In February, after the launch of the Yandex Pay system, Mikhail Popov from TalkBank told ICT.Moscow that there must be a financial institution behind this service. The analyst of Finam Group Leonid Delitsyn noted that “classical banking services (of Yandex) can make sense only as auxiliary services”.

This is not the first Yandex’s attempt to acquire a bank: in September last year, negotiations between the IT company and Tinkoff Bank were announced. Then the deal did not take place due to the fact that the parties could not agree on the terms.

Original (in Russian)