Yandex buys Bank Akropol

Back in March, we covered that Yandex was considering the purchase of Bank Akropol. This has now come to fruition.

Yandex has signed an agreement to purchase Akropol Bank. As a result of the deal, the company will acquire the Acropolis licenses, including the universal banking license.

The presence of licenses will allow Yandex to develop the direction of financial services and launch new products for users and partners.

The transaction amount will be 1.1 billion rubles, of which 75 million is a premium to the capital for the purchase. More than 85% of Akropol’s assets are in the portfolio of liquid securities and funds in accounts with the Bank of Russia.

The deal will be closed after approval by the Bank of Russia. Yandex submitted the corresponding petition to the bank on April 28.

Note that Yandex is negotiating the acquisition of Acropolis Bank, owned by the general director of the Svyaznoy group Yevgeny Davydovich, which became known in mid-March. At that time, the bank was ranked 323rd in the ranking of banks “Interfax-100”. The bank’s assets were estimated at 1.24 billion rubles. The loss at the end of 2020 amounted to about 82 million rubles.

Earlier, in the fall of last year, Yandex was negotiating the purchase of Tinkoff-Bank, but the deal never took place by agreement of the parties.

We also remind you that in the spring of 2020 Yandex submitted applications for registration of 17 trademarks related to financial services, including YaBank, YaKredit, YaBirzha, YaBroker, YaVklad, YaKapital, YaStrakhovka, YaSchet, YaPortfolio, YaSberezheniya, YaSaif, YaValuta, YaTrade, YaAktsii, and YaKash.