Tochka will buy its clients’ assets in Qiwi Bank, SBPay was removed from the App Store: main on February 27

Russia

• A Moscow court fined Badoo 1 million rubles for refusing to locate the Russians’ data. Today, the court imposed a fine on Skype for violating the rules of dissemination of information, but for a smaller amount – 500 thousand rubles.
• Yandex has opened registration for a free summer school for aspiring programmers. The company has expanded the list of available areas to five: this year it will be possible to take a course to become an analyst-developer.

World

• The National Bank of Kyrgyzstan canceled the registration of Qiwi Bank due to the revocation of its license in the country of registration. In the republic, Qiwi Bank acted as the operator of Contact and Qiwi wallet.

• Alibaba Group was the lead investor in a funding round for artificial intelligence chatbot developer Moonshot AI. According to sources, the startup, founded less than a year ago, raised $1 billion, valuing the company at about $2.5 billion.

Finance

• Qiwi Plc group commented on the revocation of Qiwi Bank’s license. According to the company, there were no signs of bankruptcy and revoking the license could make it difficult for the buyer to pay for the Russian assets.
• Tochka will buy back its clients’ funds trapped in Qiwi Bank for 8 billion rubles. The bank plans to make the first payments on March 5.

Business

• Sberbank began to produce servers for its own needs. The equipment is adapted to work in our own data centers. The bank has almost stopped using hardware and software systems from other vendors.
• The remaining Sony stores in Moscow are selling their remains before closing. Three outlets in Moscow will remain open until summer, Kommersant reported.

• Russian airlines complained to the FAS about an unreasonable increase in fees at airports. The AEVT indicated that in different cities the prices of the same services vary significantly. The association asks the service to verify the economic justification for the rate increase.

• FAS opened a case against Sberbank for violation of the law on advertising. In an advertisement for one of its offers, a credit institution indicated important information for consumers (information about deposit income) in a “difficult-to-read font.”

• In March, shares of Russian startups will appear on the Bizmall investment platform. Investors will be able to acquire them, but they will not influence the management decisions of the companies. The size of the attracted investments ranges from 20 to 200 million rubles.

• Sales of “beautiful” phone numbers almost doubled in 2023. Half of these numbers were purchased by owners of Apple devices, and the overwhelming majority of sales occurred in Moscow.

Services and technologies

• Telegram experienced a technical problem, according to data from Downradar. Chats do not load and messages are not sent. The majority of users (54%) complain of a “general crash”. According to the Downdetector resource from Brandanalytics, problems were also observed on YouTube, VKontakte, WhatsApp, Rostelecom, Megafon, MTS, Viber, Tele2 and Beeline.

• Yandex Market has started marking products whose authenticity has been verified with an “original” icon, the market said in a statement. First of all, it can be found in clothing, shoes and accessories from those brands whose originality customers most frequently ask for.

• According to the results of the independent international test bank DiBiMT, Yandex Translator became the best among other language models and online translators in the category of text translation from English to Russian.
• SBPay Apps and “Hello!” removed from the AppStore. They are still available on Google Play. Previously, the NSPK was subject to US blocking sanctions.
• Yandex ID has added authorization using biometric data. You can log in to Yandex services using your fingerprints or a facial photograph; No need to enter passwords or codes.