Russia’s Sberbank has released its annual consolidated IFRS financial statements for the 12 months ended 31 December 2019, with audit report by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
According to its CEO Herman Gref, quoted by the corporate website, “The most important achievement for 2019 was the industrial launch of the new Sberbank Digital Platform and the start of the large-scale migration of our products and services to it. By creating a private Cloud, not only did we increase the level of infrastructure utilization four-fold, we also started offering Cloud solutions to our clients. The Artificial Intelligence has already become our important business driver: the economic effect of increasing AI use amounted to RUR 42 bln ($670 mio) last year. Better customer experience allows us to widen our client base: the number of active retail clients has grown by 3 mio over the year up to 96 mio people. We have 54 mio monthly active digital users, and 24 mio daily active users. We have learned how to convert a growing number of Sberbank Online clients into sales: more than a half of consumer loans and over a third of mortgages are issued in digital channels. We are focused on the extension of our digital sales experience to Ecosystem products. Last year we defined an Ecosystem framework, adding new digital services to the Sberbank Ecosystem, including food delivery, transportation, job classified and video streaming. We remain client-centric and continually work to improve efficiency on the back of technological development that allowed Sberbank to ensure a return on equity of more than 20%.”
The 2019 net profit amounted to RUR 845 bln (+1.6% y-o-y). The loan portfolio quality improved in 2019 and the share of impaired loans in total gross loan portfolio at amortized cost decreased by 0.4% to 7.5%.