Chairman of the Management Board, CEO of Tinkoff Bank Oliver Hughes has addressed a memo to the staff, asking them not to call their workplace a bank.

“I often hear the expression “at our bank” used during personal conversations with colleagues, presentations at the company or at outside events, which is even worse. It is wrong. We are not just a bank, we offer so much in a powerful, quickly growing ecosystem, and abandoning that outdated expression is long overdue,” Hughes said as quoted by Vedomosti.


In the memo Hughes asks the staff to say “Tinkoff” or “the Tinkoff Group” instead of “the bank”. He explains there are two reasons for that. Firstly, the Tinkoff brand includes not only the bank, but other companies as well, from mobile operator to ticket sale service, so saying “the bank” is disrespectful towards the colleagues working for other members of the Tinkoff Group. “Secondly, the word “bank” has negative connotations and we are trying to distance ourselves from it,” Hughes said.

When asked what the connotations could be, a Tinkoff representative clarified that Hughes did not describe “bank” as “a bad word”, he meant that it “did not sound correctly when applied to the Tinkoff Group”.

According to McKinsey Partner Sergey Krylov believes that changing the language used by the staff is one of the most powerful tools of transformation of the corporate culture. The boundaries between banks, telecom companies and retail are fading. Many banks believe they should become something more to remain relevant.

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