Yandex.Money
Yandex.Money is Russia’s largest electronic payment service according to a 2016 survey by TNS. It is an online payment service that works with two types of clients — individual users and merchants. Since 2002, Yandex.Money has been providing services to those who pay and those who accept payments. Its mission is to make payments more convenient, secure, and accessible and to provide its clients with an opportunity to pay in a convenient way.
The service is the joint venture of Russia’s leading search engine Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX), and Russia’s largest bank Sberbank. In 2013, Sberbank, one of the largest banks in Eastern Europe, bought a major stake in Yandex.Money. Currently, Sberbank owns a 75% stake in the company, the remaining 25% plus one ruble is owned by Yandex. With new stakeholders, Yandex.Money obtained access to a broad payment infrastructure of Sberbank. Users obtained an opportunity to top up their e-wallets through the chain of Sberbank’s ATMs and terminals, and online banking.
Yandex.Money has a b2b service Yandex.Checkout — a payment aggregator for online stores and other businesses that need payments on their online platforms. Yandex.Checkout was launched by Yandex.Money in 2013. Yandex.Checkout is currently the leading service for accepting online payments in Russia, according to a 2016 survey by MARC. With this payment solution, merchants from all over the world can offer Russian consumers the online payment methods most popular among Russians and CIS-citizens just in one button ‘Pay with Yandex’: bank cards, direct debit (online banking), e-wallets, mobile phones, and cash via mobile retailers and payment kiosks (there are over 250 thousand cash-acceptance points all over CIS). Currently more than 76,000 online stores across the globe use Yandex.Checkout, including such partners as Skype, AliExpress (Alibaba Group|Alibaba), JD.com and BlaBlaCar.
Yandex.Money also has an e-wallet, which is the original product of the company. Yandex.Money offers consumers easy, safe, and reliable methods of paying online on its own site and mobile app. The service hosts about 30 million user accounts with about 15,000 new accounts opened daily. Recent TNS research showed that Yandex.Money is the most popular e-wallet in Russia: every third user of the Internet in Russia pays by Yandex.Money e-wallet. Using Yandex.Money, gamers also can pay on Nintendo, top up an account on Steam (software), Wargaming (company)|Wargaming, Riot Games, buy codes for Apple Inc.|Apple (iTunes) and Xbox. Yandex. Money became the official sales operator of the popular game publisher Electronic Arts. Russian users can now buy FIFA 17 for PC and Xbox through the service. Yandex.Money also distributes Blizzard Entertainment virtual cards, which provide users with a convenient payment option for Blizzard’s online games: World of Warcraft, Overwatch (video game), Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft, Hearthstone (video game), and Diablo (series).
Customers can also use Yandex.Money cards as a form of payment: both plastic and virtual MasterCards are available for issue. In 2015 Yandex.Money received MasterCard Principal Member status. By the 2016 Yandex.Money has issued more than 500,000 plastic cards and 11 million virtual MasterCards. Yandex.Money was among the first to bring its users Apple Pay in Russia, which is transforming mobile payments with an easy, secure and private way to pay in stores, apps and on the web. Customers can pay via Apple Pay by adding their plastic or virtual prepaid Yandex.Money cards to Apple Wallet. Online stores and other merchants, which accept payments via Yandex.Checkout, can also offer consumers fast and convenient contactless payment via Apple Pay. With Touch ID there is no need to manually fill out lengthy payment forms or repeatedly type in billing information.
More than 4 million users have downloaded the Yandex.Money mobile app. 35% of them use an iOS device. Using the app, they can transfer funds via iMessage, pay bills — such as utilities, internet, mobile services — make loan payments, access their most frequent payments, and more. Users can also download the Yandex.Money app on Apple Watch. Yandex.Money mobile application Yandex.Fines for iOS implemented a new feature, which enables paying for traffic fines via Apple Pay.
According to a June 2015 public opinion survey, Yandex.Money is widely known in Russia. In a survey conducted by Taylor Nelson Sofres|TNS, 92 percent of Russians are familiar with the service, and 44 percent regularly use Yandex.Money to make payments.