By Sebastian Petric and Daniel Pail, RBI | The technicalities of transitioning from plan to market are still a hotly debated topic. In light of the current anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we recap the ideas on economic transformation and summarize the realities the Eastern European countries faced in the 1990s. Transition […]
By Stoyan Genov, Raiffeisen Bank in Bulgaria | “One of the fastest growing fintech destinations in the CEE Region”; “An evolving fintech hub”; “The most vibrant fintech destination in the SEE region”. You can often hear or read these definitions of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Trust us, this is not an overstatement. Behind these […]
By Anastasia Stepina, Raiffeisenbank in Russia | We live in a time where traditional media by no means is our single source of information. The influence of blogs can not be denied and especially channels like YouTube can reach significant resonance in a user group or a society as a whole. Often, specific single bloggers […]
By Gunter Deuber and Ruslan Gadeev, RBI Vienna | The times of more radical changes and upheavals in the Russian banking sector seem to be over for now. Following years of more subdued profitability (from 2014-17) the Return on Equity (RoE) rebounded nicely in 2018 – a trend that continued in 2019. We also see […]
By Angelina Krutova, Raiffeisenbank in Russia | The Russian fintech market has been growing significantly for the past two years in terms of both the number of deals and the volume of investment. The market has several particularities: Russia is a leading global supplier of IT specialists and some areas such as P2P lending, crowd […]
By Marie Mesropyan, Raiffeisenbank in Russia | Big business is still experiencing a shortage of digital banking services. Leaders of the financial industry are actively trying to solve the problem Digital banking infrastructure for business in Russia, especially for large and medium businesses, still lags behind the mass retail segment, experts say. “In general, development […]
By Stanislav Murashov, Raiffeisenbank in Russia, and Andreas Schwabe, RBI | An oil price shock and the introduction of economic and financial sanctions led to a strong devaluation of the rouble and a recession in 2014-15. Since then, however, Russia has clearly regained financial strength. This is expressed in a surplus on both the current […]
Tanja Dietrich-Hübner, Head of Sustainability at Austria – REWE International AG, Michael Huber, Fund Manager at Raiffeisen KAG, Christian Pladerer, CEO of the Austrian Institute of Ecology, and Doris Ribitsch, Head of Molecular Biology at the Institute for Environmental Biotechnology at BOKU Vienna (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences), discuss the challenges surrounding the […]
By Evliana Berani, Raiffeisen Bank Kosovo | Aferdita Saraçini Kelmendi leads one of the biggest businesses in Kosovo: a well-known national radio and television, RTV 21. Building and running one of the biggest television stations in Kosovo, in an extremely competitive media environment, is obviously quite a difficult and challenging task. Changing the mindset and […]
By Patricia Lang-Schönberger | Discover CEE spoke to Wilhelm-Peter Hasslacher from the Austrian Economic Chambers (WKO), who works as business delegate for the Foreign Trade Centre Laibach in Slovenia. He is an expert on Southeastern Europe: his assignments as business delegate have taken him to Zagreb and Sarajevo, and he is now in Ljubljana, where […]
By Valbona Gjeka, Raiffeisen Bank Albania, and Gunter Deuber, RBI Vienna | The economy of Kosovo has shown solid and stable real GDP growth of about 4.1 percent year-on-year on average from 2015-2018, being one of the economies with the highest growth level in the region of Southeastern Europe. However, even an average growth of […]
By Christian Wolf, RBI | Driven by the aim of providing better and better customer experience, changes in the global payments landscape have accelerated over the past few years and resulted in an increased array of payment options to choose from for customers across the globe. In addition to the advancements in technology, Open Banking […]
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