CTO interview: David Rafalovsky, Sberbank Group
Summary
“Several years ago, Sberbank made an untypical decision to build its own digital platform for banking and non-banking services,” says Rafalovsky. Our scale – 350 centralised automated systems, more than 15,000 operations per second, and over 120PB of data – is quite an architectural and technological challenge, but we successfully overcame that.” According to Rafalovsky, moving to agile methodology also presented significant challenges – both culturally, as employees were not used to working in this mode, and organisationally, given Sberbank’s scale. “It would have taken us years in the past to adjust our processes and our culture to operate in this environment.” Another potential issue facing many tech companies that provide digital services is data security. “We had some issues with internal fraud last year, which we successfully overcame, but we’ve never been penetrated from outside, and that is a testament of how much effort, time and investment we dedicate to cyber security and protecting our customers’ data.” Sberbank’s digital platform is based on a cloud-native architecture, says Rafalovsky. The cloud business in Russia is still immature and relatively small, but it is growing rapidly.” Sberbank considers artificial intelligence (AI) to be one of the most promising technologies.