Russian investment in fintech makes up less than 1% of the global funding in this area, Pavel Novikov, director of the Skolkovo Foundation’s fintech center, said during the Digital Transformation of the Financial Sector conference at the Higher School of Economics.
“Last year, global investment in fintech reached almost $ 40 bln. Russia’s investment was less than 1% of that amount,” the Director of Skolkovo FinTech & Blockchain Center said.
Russia’s fintech is a desert now, he added. Yet, according to Novikov, that does not mean there are no unicorn startups here (privately held startup companies valued over $1 bln).
“I think we will have such startups. There are prerequisites for this. A couple of weeks ago, a Russian startup Nginx, a Skolkovo resident company, was bought for $ 670 mio by one of the world’s leading developers of cloud systems, F5 Networks,” he said.
He added that it was the largest transaction in the Russian venture capital market.