Yandex agrees to Tinkoff bank acquisition for $5.5bn

Yandex is Russia’s biggest tech company and now it is set to buy the challenger bank called Tinkoff for $5.5 billion.

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Banker Oleg Tinkov, the Tinkoff founder, told TASS this Wednesday that the deal with Yandex provides for the preservation of the Tinkoff brand and the entire bank team.

Oleg Tinkov, and the founder of Yandex, Arcady Volozh, have been contemplating the idea of merging for a while already. The biggest argument was that the capitalization of the merged company could exceed $20bn.

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“The deal is still under negotiation … It provides for the preservation of the Tinkoff brand and the complete preservation of the team with a minimum of integration with Yandex,” said Tinkov.

“We see huge synergies in the merger with Yandex, while for clients everything will be the same and even better, like in the case of the Facebook-Instagram deal,” he added.

This would also unite prime human resources in both segments, making a strong competitor for Sberbank.

Yandex also departed a joint venture with state-owned Sberbank, which cleared the way for an agreement with Tinkoff that is the biggest digital bank in Russia.

Yandex is often being referred to as “Russia’s Google,” and was founded during the 1990s. The company has grown from a search engine to provide services including ride-hailing, food delivery, music and video streaming, and educational tech. Yandex now has a bigger market share than Google in Russia.