The next battlefield for the retail customer will not be the deposit rate, but the convenience of the application. Kirill Tsarev, First Deputy Chairman of the Sberbank Management Board, stated at the Financial Congress that competition in interfaces and customer experience is coming to the forefront.

The reason is open banking. The technology allows banks, with the client's consent, to securely pull data about their accounts, deposits, and transaction histories from other organizations. According to Tsarev, Russians already live in a reality of multiple banks and marketplaces, which means they want to see everything in one place. The ideal, which the market will not reach immediately, is zero additional fields and screens when accessing third-party products.

T-Bank has already reported on a pilot: about 700,000 clients used the service, 450,000 of them within the T-Bank application itself. Four players are fully connected – T-Bank, Sber, VTB, and Alfa-Bank. T-Bank demands that basic data transfer be made free, calling the fee a barrier to scaling, and investments in multi-banking a leap of faith without a clear business model.