In an interview with Kommersant, Ozon’s Vice President for Digital Finance Vahe Ovasapyan commented on the purchase of a bank and the prospects for the development of the company’s fintech direction.

“We believe in the union of fintech and e-commerce, our sellers and buyers really need convenient financial products in order to buy online or sell online,” said Vahe Ovasapyan, adding that the company doesn’t plan to create a large universal bank։ “We have a goal to create a good bank that will specifically meet the needs of our client.”

According to him, Ozon has a lot of customers, buyers and sellers. The strategic goal of the fintech business for these clients is to serve as many of the financial needs associated with Ozon’s business as possible. “We understand what products customers need, so now we are building infrastructure for them, the bank is a part of it.”



“We want a fast, flexible and convenient bank for our specific needs. If you buy a global, universal bank, its IT systems are often built 20 years ago. The average age of our developers is under 30, and they already work in other programming languages. At the same time, the bank that we bought has a very good history: there were clear shareholders and clean, transparent activities,” Ovasapyan said.

When asked that a small bank would have to be capitalized, he particularly said:

“The question is, what products you make. Many payment products do not require a lot of capital. And we will be doing or are already doing capital-intensive loan products, at least most of them, with partner banks. From a fintech point of view, we are working on a hybrid model.

For example, Ozon.Invest is our marketplace seller lending platform. There are already many financial partners there: banks and microfinance organizations. We like the partnership strategy, we give a wide choice to clients where it matters, for example, in lending. In some aspects, the product is important to us as a payment instrument - it is very native, seamless and therefore convenient. This can be done only when you have complete control over your IT infrastructure. This is one of the reasons why we needed our own bank.”

According to Vahe Ovasapyan, it is difficult to predict what will happen in the long term, because the market is very dynamic. “At the moment, we see a strategy focused on payment instruments. We realize that we have great advantages. A lot of transactions take place on the platform, and we can offer our customers even more convenience through some kind of loyalty tools.”

He also noted that the company has the Ozon Card, a debit product that works well in practice - over a million activations. “Of course, when there is a good payment product for customers, it is logical to offer other niche products as well. There is only one question: can you invent good products,” said Vahe Osvasapyan.

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