After breaking the deal with Tinkoff Bank, Yandex started thinking about buying a new bank. According to The Bell, citing sources, this is a small bank “Acropolis”, which ranks 340th in terms of assets among Russian credit institutions. In 2020, it was bought by the general director of the Svyaznoy group Evgeny Davydovich
The sale and purchase agreement may be signed in the next few days, the parties do not disclose the amount of the possible transaction. The bank’s assets are estimated at 1.24 billion rubles. One of The Bell’s interlocutors explained that in fact Yandex is preparing to buy not the bank itself, but a banking license, and the company has no plans to open branches or issue loans. “The company got burned at the deal with Tinkov and made a fundamental decision to do fintech on its own. For this it needs an almost empty license,” another source said.
The upcoming deal between Yandex and Tinkoff Bank became known in September 2020. It was assumed that the company will buy out all 100 percent of the shares of TCS Group (the head structure of the credit institution), including minority shares. The deal was valued at $ 5.48 billion, but in mid-October the parties abandoned their plans.
In Yandex, Oleg Tinkov himself was called the culprit of the breakdown. According to Tigran Khudaverdyan, Managing Director of the Yandex Group of Companies, the businessman has been trying to sell the bank for many years and he himself turned to the head of Yandex, Arkady Volozh. He agreed to start negotiations, because the merger with a large financial organization was interesting for the company, especially after the sale of its own project Yandex.Money to Sberbank. At the same time, the top manager of Yandex stressed, Tinkov constantly demanded new powers for himself and revised the conditions.
Tinkov himself, in a letter regarding the rejection of the transaction, expressed confidence that the bank will overcome difficulties on its own. He predicted that in the future TCS Group itself will be able to buy Yandex, since the attitude of users to the two companies is very different