Sberbank CEO thinks finance, retail, medicine most promising

MOSCOW, Nov 27 (PRIME) -- Finance, retail, and medicine are the most promising industries for the next several years, German Gref, CEO of Russia’s largest bank Sberbank, said on Monday during the Synergy Global Forum.

“From the point of view of industry scale, we’ve made estimates for ourselves and formed the priority spheres where we would like to participate, and the number one is finance, obviously. It is undoubtedly in the center of a thing called disruption, the thing which will change rapidly. Fortunately or unfortunately, financial technologies will develop very rapidly,” he said.

“The second is retail. About 50% of our companies is engaged in retail, and this is about functioning as a mediator. Development of e-commerce makes physical mediation obsolete.”

He said that mediation in retail will become obsolete in five or six years.

Medicine also holds vast possibilities for investment. “It does not mean that we have to open a clinic tomorrow. Medicine starts to aggregate a big amount of technologies in itself. There is almost no technology that medicine is unable to use, ranging from quantum sensors to big data and neural networks,” he said.

The Russian economy is at a stage of upgrade, and it should repeat what other countries are doing, but at a higher quality and adding some creative ideas to existing technologies, he said.

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