Yandex

The company’s financial services are provided as a result of a joint venture with Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank. In 2013, the bank bought a 75% majority stake in the company, with Yandex retaining the remaining 25% of shares.

The most widely used service provided by this company is its e-wallet. This convenient way to pay for goods and services online has over 30 million customers already and continues to grow rapidly. It is by far the most popular way to make e-payments in Russia, with around a third of internet payments in Russia made using the service. Top ups and payments can be made via the Yandex.money website using both desktop PCs or mobile, where more than 4 million phone users have downloaded the company’s app. This app is compatible with use on any of the popular mobile operating systems. It can also be used on Apple Watch. Yandex.Money was also among the first services to offer its customers the ability to use Apple Pay in Russia.

The company can also issue both real world and virtual MasterCard, both of which can be used to make online payments. This service is a relatively recent development, the company only achieving MasterCard Principal Member status in 2015. At the time of writing, Yandex has issued well over half a million plastic cards and over 11 million virtual MasterCards.

The company also works to facilitate payments at the other end of the transaction: its business to business (B2B) service enables retailers and merchants to accept payments from citizens of the Russian Federation. Only launched in 2013, Yandex.checkout is currently the leading method for accepting online payments in Russia. Indeed, around 80,000 online stores across the world are currently signed up to the Yandex service in order to receive online payments. This includes several of today’s most internationally renowned casinos.

Yet all these financial services form just a part of the enormous range of functions carried out by what is one of the biggest names in Russia. This is because Yandex is the largest technology company in the entire Russian Federation. Although the name is barely recognised in the United Kingdom and wider Europe, it operates the largest search engine in Russia. It is in effect, Russia’s Google, with around two thirds of the nation’s internet searches carried out by Yandex. Unknown in the West it may be, but Yandex is in fact the fourth most used search engine in the world.

The original technology company was originated in 1997. It has its headquarters in Moscow, with satellite offices in St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod.