Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank and home of its largest ATM network, has begun enhancing its ATM proposition to bring the omnichannel experience to its customers. What with such a large undertaking, is this too great a task? Patrick Brusnahan writes

The omnichannel experience is a huge talking point in the industry. However, most of the conversation revolves around new and exciting solutions, but what about the ATM? What part does that have to play? Sberbank considers it to be crucial and a “competitive advantage in the market”.

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Andrey Zharsky, managing director of the Bank By Your Side division at Sberbank, believes that you can have a great mobile application and a terrific omnichannel experience, but if the customer then goes to an old, malfunctioning ATM, all of that effort goes out of the window.

Speaking at RBR’s Self-Service Banking Europe 2019, he explained Sberbank’s last two year completely renovating Sberbank’s ATM network.

Renovating and reinventing

This is no easy task. Sberbank has the 7th largest ATM network in the world with over 77,000 in the field. According to the bank, it has monthly average users of 76 million customers with 13,000 operations per minute happening in the network.

Transforming the network is no easy task, so what are the priorities? Zharsky named the strategic pillars:

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  • Basic service: Focusing on the basic service of cash withdrawal. Russia is an “energetic country with some very digital company” but cash as a basic service will still remain the number one thing. Sberbank want to make it the “most perfect basic service ever”.
  • Location: Using artificial intelligence (AI) to decide where needs an ATM the most. Zharsky said: “If we have a machine that has a poor workload, we take it out and decide where we should put it next.” The bank will also find out which transactions are the most popular so the right hardware is installed.
  • Technology: This seems obvious but Sberbank wants to use the ATMs to generate sales leads. When a certain customer uses the bank’s ATMs, tellers receive a push notification on an iPad saying what they can offer the customer. This has already converted 6% more sales in the field, according to Zharsky.

Who needs to enter a card?

With new hardware comes new features and Sberbank is more than happy to utilise them. The first is a trend taking many nations by storm: contactless.

“Russia is absolutely a contactless country,” stated Zharsky. “

“So 99.5% of our POS terminals are contactless in Russia. If you come to Russia, you can forget your card and wallet, use your phone and it’s okay. We have 80% of our ATMs currently in the field working with NFC, both cards, phones, watches, whatever devices that work with Visa or Mastercard that I’ve seen, not only for our cards, but also the cards of any bank.

“The share of transactions currently happening through NFC grows 5% every month. Currently we have something like 15% of all ATM transactions happening with NFC. Till the end of the year, I’m sure this will be not less than 40-45% in total.”

Biometrics will also be installed in the form of facial recognition. Sberbank is implementing the technology, which has already been developed.

He continued: “We started in the beginning of this year, upgrading the network with the cameras. Currently we have more than 7,000 ATMs already equipped with the cameras.

“In the next four months, we start launching the transactions without card or phone, just your face. We have developed this technology and it will be live in September.”

Impressively, this is all being done in-house as Sberbank decided that vendors could not provide what it needed.

Zharsky concludes: “We understood that there will be no service providers in the market that can make the top-end service we want. That’s why we started making our own technical monitoring system. We don’t use any monitoring system provided by the vendors. Older monitoring system providers cannot handle our quality. We made our own system that is currently in place.

“We have our own financial monitoring our own care, we have our own service company that works are under our service standards, and also works for the market providing the same service standards for us and for our colleagues. We have a customer call management system. This is the system in place that will always improve on a daily basis.”