Digital banking ecosystems: Comparative analysis and competition regulation in Russia

Abstract

Digital ecosystems allow banks to expand their offerings of financial and non-financial services, and thereby raise the quality and speed of customer service. Yet the broader range of banks’ non-financial services increases the size of their non-core assets and affects their financial stability. This creates certain complexities to ecosystems’ management both at the level of a bank and at the level of financial market regulation. The study covers theoretical and practical aspects of setting up and developing ecosystems in the Russian banking industry. The theory of industrial organisation and the ecosystem concept constitute the methodological basis of the research. The study adopts comparative and structural analysis methods. The evidence comes from public and internal reporting of PAO Sberbank, AO Tinkoff Bank, VTB Bank (PAO). The research found that banking ecosystems differ in the key area of activities (for instance, the Tinkoff Bank’s ecosystem focuses on investment and education, whereas VTB Bank’s one concentrates on a housing programme), nature of interaction between their participants, and the method of creation (universal, niche, outsourcing, insourcing). The development specifics of digital banking ecosystems depend on their specialisation, structure of immobilised assets, customer base, and level of business processes’ digitalisation. The value of the research comes from the revealed structural and functional peculiarities of digital ecosystems in the banking industry, as well as in the proved necessity to further refine the methods for accounting and assessing immobilised assets of banks.