Renowned psychotherapist, President of Higher School of Methodology Andrey Kurpatov, who recently headed Sberbank’s newly opened Laboratory of neurosciences and human behavior, will arrange social interaction between people.

“People work and interact with Sberbank, people work in Sberbank. The biggest issue now is the quality of that social interaction. The systems that people face are growing more complicated, and unfortunately, people have lost the skill to interact with each other. Take any bank department – it’s a certain business process carried out by people. And these people have to work in an environment where they are able to easily answer any questions, when they understand how to function properly,” Kurpatov said in the interview to Ksenia Sobchak.

According to him, the issue is not solved by the Sberbank staff. It is solved through the internal matrix that allows the given manager to be a pleasant interlocutor who relays corresponding services.


Andrey Kurpatov is certain it doesn’t matter who is in charge. “Be it Gref or someone else, it isn’t important. In my worldview, everything depends on how the processes are tuned,” he said.

“The matter is that Gref is managing a huge enterprise and he is busy with building business processes. I’m certain he will be incredibly happy if one day he doesn’t come to the office and the enterprise still runs like a clock,” noted Kurpatov.

According to him, technological giants are becoming infrastructure environments: Facebook, Google and Apple do everything, because no one wants just one specific service.

“Sberbank is one of the most technologically advanced companies in Russia, which creates an infrastructure to satisfy all our needs,” added Kurpatov.

He is convinced that the fourth technological revolution has already happened and Sberbank should take the “bank” out of its name, because banks no longer exist in their previous format, and a new approach to clients has to be formed.

Andrey Kurpatov told Sobchak that the newly opened lab will have 12 staffers: 6 people from Sberbank and 6 from Kurpatov’s team.

He did not disclose his salary at Sberbank, only said it would be much smaller than he requested. Kurpatov also mentioned that attending just one lecture of his costs RUB 700,000 (about USD 10,640).

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