Russia’s Shadow Economy Goes Cashless Under State Bank's Watch
Lights illuminate racks of servers and data storage banks in the Sberbank PJSC data processing center (DPC) at the Skolkovo Innovation Center, in Moscow, Russia, on Tuesday, Dec. 26, 2017.
Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
Russia’s shadow economy, which employs almost every other worker in the country, is finding a refuge in the most surprising of places.
State-controlled Sberbank PJSC last year handled about 1 trillion rubles ($17 billion) in person-to-person online transfers that represented frequent payments from numerous clients to a small number of accounts, which could be linked to commercial activity, according to Mikhail Matovnikov, a senior managing director and chief analyst at Russia’s largest lender.