A new bank opens in Russia for the first time in the last four years. It will operate fully online, without offices and ATMs.

Vedomosti reports that the founder and sole owner of Bank 131 is President of IT holding Fix Dmitry Yeremeyev, whose most famous project is the cashback service ePN.bz.

The authorized capital of the new digital bank makes RUB 340 million (RUB 300 million is the threshold for basic license). According to Yeremeyev, he collected that sum from the earnings from the cashback service.

Bank 131 was registered in Kazan and named after the local physics and mathematics lyceum that Yeremeyev attended.

The main area of focus of the new bank is payments and cash management for online companies (retailers, social media, cashback services, etc.). “We also plan to work with natural persons through e-wallets and develop the IT platform to issue payment cards, create loyalty programs and new financial products for client companies,” said Dmitry Yeremeyev.


The bank will not issue loans and will be able to get the permit for mobilizing capital only after two years of operation. The commission fees for transactions are expected to be the main income of the bank. It will start serving companies this autumn and pay off the investments in two years.

Bank 131 already has a team and intends to apply a maximally conservative approach to transactions. “We don’t have experience in bank lending yet, which is why it makes sense to allocate funds to accounts in the Central Bank in order to avoid risks,” said Yeremeyev.

Russian experts give varying estimates for the new bank’s future. According to one of them, the commitment to transactions is fraught with strategic risks for the bank owner, as it is unclear if the commission will be enough to cover the expenses, so “the bank might have to compete on price in the early stages”.

There is another opinion indicating that banking in Russia failed to attract investors in recent years as profitability was decreasing and the measures for a “cleaning” of the sector did not inspire optimism, so it is “great that there is an investor who is ready to develop internet banking and unafraid of the mentioned risks”.

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