By Stefan Andjelic, RBI | Payment systems are a vital part of the economic and financial infrastructure. Their efficient functioning, allowing transactions to be completed safely and on time, makes a key contribution to the overall economic performance. (Bank Of England, 2000). Against this backdrop, the role of banks, including the range of financial services […]
By Anila Hoxha, Raiffeisen Bank in Albania | In the past few years, Albania has been experiencing an emerging startup ecosystem. Nevertheless, most of the country’s startups are still in the early stages of seed financing. Lately, however, many private and public players have expressed their interest in funding startups usually in the field of […]
By Valbona Gjeka, Raiffeisen Bank Albania, Gunter Deuber, RBI | In a somewhat surprising move, the Council of Europe did not agree to give the green light for the official opening of accession talks to Albania in 2019. That was unexpected, because the European Commission and most of the EU countries recognized the progress of […]
By Eleonora Georgieva, Raiffeisen Bank in Bulgaria | Well-being. Improving the health of all is one of the main goals of the United Nations for the next 10 years. The organization’s current set of sustainable development goals include ensuring a healthy life and the promotion of well-being for everyone. And as we all know, food […]
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 […]