IBM has announced that Russian banking giant Sberbank has launched a new corporate online banking platform designed together with IBM iX to deliver an enhanced online banking experience for small and medium businesses.

Sberbank serves nearly 1.5 million corporate clients across Russia, every third Russian enterprise registered as legal entity. In Sberbank, small and medium businesses account for 35 percent of the corporate loans portfolio. To serve its corporate clients, Sberbank’s previous platform couldn’t handle the increased online activity from clients as they engaged with digital services.

Sberbank turned to IBM iX to transform the online solution by creating a new banking experience for corporate customers. Using Design Thinking methodology, IBM iX, together with Sberbank, created an online banking platform featuring a digital marketplace aimed to maximize the ease of purchasing key products and services.

“The amount of offline operations performed at Sberbank branches by corporate clients shrinks by 25 percent every quarter, as more clients wouldn’t accept any other way of communication but digital. Our goal is to have no more paperwork in communicating with our clients by the end of 2017,” said Anatoly Popov, senior vice-president of the Corporate Business unit at Sberbank.

“For us, the most exciting part was that we gained business trust and worked closely with Sberbank's clients, focusing on their actual needs and converting them into a totally new solution. This is a successful collaboration story which united all capabilities of IBM iX including consulting, design and web development in creating an innovative digital product for the market,” said Evgeny Sokolov, partner, leader of IBM Interactive Experience, Russia and CIS.

IBM iX is now working on deepening the knowledge of the needs of the largest businesses in Russia by helping Sberbank to create game-changing services and products, which would secure its leadership in the market.