Sber and Tinkoff agreed to create an emergency interbank communication channel to help their clients. As Vedomosti writes, this will help solve customer problems in cases of payments made in error and cases where money was seized by fraudsters. The channel will be used in situations where it is necessary to contact other banks or companies to resolve a customer’s problem.
Sber and Tinkoff are the two largest banks in terms of the number of active retail clients. At the end of last year, the number of Sber customers amounted to 108.5 million people, and Tinkoff’s to 28 million people. As Tinkoff noted, this combination of efforts will make it possible to solve hundreds of thousands of customer problems a month worth billions of rubles.
The idea of creating a channel arose after a discussion of a similar case at the Central Bank’s “Customer Focus” forum, held at the end of November 2023. Sber was contacted by a pharmacist from a pharmacy who accidentally sold a medicine with the wrong dose. A woman bought the medication for her young daughter and the pharmacy employee gave her an adult dose, which could be dangerous for the child’s health. The pharmacist called the Sber contact center because the pharmacy has terminals for card payments. The operator asked to find the receipt, but the problem was that the client paid with a Tinkoff card and therefore Sberbank could not contact her directly. As a result, the operator herself called the Tinkoff contact center. There they found the customer using the transaction number and already contacted her directly with a request to contact the pharmacy. After this, the management of the two banks thought: why not create an official channel for interbank interaction? In these cases, which happen all the time, this will be of great help to clients.
For now, the channel will help solve the problems of individuals, but later the practice can be extended to legal entities. First of all, certain rules will be prescribed for employees of both banks on how to act in controversial cases. As Tinkoff explained in the case of transfers, if a client accidentally made a mistake in the details, the bank employees will communicate with each other, verify with their systems that the funds went to the wrong place and, with the consent of the client’s recipient . transfer, return the funds to the sender. These situations occur regularly, and usually, to return the funds, the client is forced to contact directly the representatives of the bank to which the transfer was sent.
Banks are also discussing the possibility of sharing data online to protect customers from fraud. This involves, among other things, the rapid blocking of funds that customers transferred to the fraudsters’ accounts, before the fraudsters manage to withdraw them from the bank, and the return of these funds. Also, such data exchange will help return funds to the client if a purchase was made from his account without his consent and confirmation with an SMS code.
As Tinkoff said, these are key cases, but the range of questions can be completely different and non-standard, so as we test the pilot, we will expand the set of cases for which customers will be able to receive immediate support.
“We need to anticipate customer expectations so that there is rapid communication not only in cases of fraud, but also at the level of customer service,” said Stanislav Bliznyuk, chairman of the board of directors of Tinkoff, about the initiative discussed at the forum..
For now, this is a two-bank pilot project, but other market participants may join. Then the system of interbank operational interaction can be unified.
