Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
Russia’s largest bank – Sberbank is setting up a joint venture with the Israeli forex broker and social trading platform developer eToro. The deal was announced at a press conference by Sberbank’s CEO Herman Gref, quoted by Russia’s business portal RBC Daily.
The new partnership would provide eToro’s services to Russian investors and the clients of the bank will have access to the social trading platform of the broker. They would be able to trade on it by using their accounts in Sberbank for payments.
According to Gref the joint venture will be launched by the end of 2016, as more time is needed for integration of the shared channels. The profits will be split 50:50 between eToro and Sberbank.
Gref said the new service is aimed at both beginner and experienced traders and will be promoted heavily among the bank’s younger clients who use remote banking services via telephone and online.
“The partnership between Sberbank and eToro will enable our clients to take advantage of the vast potential of eToro’s trader community,” noted Gref, quoted in a press release. “The eToro platform features a simple interface, which supports trading in global financial markets, using the knowledge and experience of other traders.”
Yoni Assia, the CEO and founder of eToro also expressed his satisfaction with the deal: “We are pleased that our partnership with Sberbank will enable us to provide access to our services to the clients of the largest Russian bank, as well as to offer an alternative financial instrument and innovational platform for investments in financial markets,” he said.
This is not the first partnership between eToro and Sberbank. In November 2014 the bank became partner in eToro via its venture fund SBT Venture Capital. In 2015 eToro launched a Russian-language version of its platform.
eToro was launched in 2008 and offers a social platform for investors to communicate, share strategies and trade in forex, CFDs, commodities, indices, stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). It has more than 4.5 million registered users from 170 countries across the world and is regulated by UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC).
Sberbank is Russia’s largest bank. It holds almost one third of aggregate Russian banking sector assets, it is the key lender to the national economy and the biggest deposit taker in the country. It was founded by Russia’s central bank, which is also the principal shareholder and owns 50% of the capital plus one voting share. Sberbank has more than 135 million individual customers and more than 1 million corporate clients in 22 countries.
