24 per cent annual interest on time deposits: St Petersburg Travel Notes, installment three

When you mention retail banking in Russia, what comes to mind first is Sberbank. They are the country's largest bank, serving the greatest number of depositors and providing the largest number of mortgage loans. What was once a network of shambolic offices where you would wait in line interminably for a lazy and ill-mannered cashier to hand out cash pensions to the elderly who were lined up ahead of you has been totally transformed in the past decade under the inspired direction of its CEO German Gref. Gref is a former minister of finance in the Yeltsin days who, unlike so many of his fellow Liberals with a capital ‘L,’ knows how to make things work and has implemented high tech throughout his business. Today Sber, as it fashionably calls itself for short, is modernized to high international standards. The staff are uniformly well trained and well disposed to clients.