Center-invest Bank received the country’s first order from the Marketplace platform and opened Russia’s first remote deposit account.

The Marketplace is an electronic platform designed to provide remote access to financial services, 24/7, without any geographical constraints. From the comfort of their own home, consumers can open an account with any bank that is connected to the platform. The project is being developed by the Moscow Exchange, with the Bank of Russia helping to create the regulatory environment for the effective and reliable functioning of the system.

"Center-invest Bank seeks to provide convenient access to products not only for consumers in the six regions where we have branches, but also for people living elsewhere in Russia," says Yuri Bogdanov, Center-invest Bank’s Director of Innovations. "In the near future, we plan to attract the first 100 million rubles in deposits via the Marketplace, providing attractive rates. We also intend to participate in other sectors on the platform, offering loans, bankcards and investment products."

To open the first deposit account via the Marketplace, the bank successfully completed the full cycle of transactions, from submitting a catalogue of deposit products, to receiving the customer’s funds, and submitting a report to the Registrar of Financial Technologies (RFT).

The RFT is a new instrument for the Russian financial market and fundamental to the Marketplace’s trusted environment. Information stored by the RFT will allow consumers to have, and to check at any time (using channels that are independent from banks), legally valid confirmation of a transaction in the absence of paper agreements.

Connecting its services to the Marketplace, Center-invest Bank used cutting-edge microservices architecture with Spring Boot and Kotlin for the first time.

Digitalisation is a key growth driver for the banking sector. The Marketplace platform makes financial services more accessible for consumers, while also expanding opportunities for financial institutions to enter new markets.

The Marketplace concept was first presented in October 2017 at the FINOPOLIS Forum of Innovative Financial Technologies. Center-invest Bank signed up to help develop and pilot the project. Throughout all the project phases, we have been actively involved in developing and testing technical, business and legal solutions on the platform.