TCS Group mulls launching taxi, car sharing, food delivery services
MOSCOW. Jan 23 (Interfax) - TCS Group Holding, the parent company of Russia's Tinkoff Bank and Tinkoff Insurance, is studying the possibility of developing taxi, car sharing, food delivery and other services within the group, but there no consensus on this yet within its team, the group's principal owner, Oleg Tinkov said in an interview with vc.ru.
"There are serious ideological arguments within the company. In the course of 2019 it will become clear whether we'll go compete head to head with Yandex or not. But we're studying the issue of creating taxi, car sharing, food delivery [services] and everything else," Tinkov said.
"Part of our senior management believes that we should remain within the bounds of cloud services and the financial paradigm. There is no common position yet, and that's alright. We're still alive and earning money because we always have big discussions and a paranoid approach. My voice in such discussions is equal to one, the majority decides. I don't know what we'll ultimately decide," Tinkov said.
He said that the main competitor for TCS Group right now is Yandex, since it is difficult to compete with Sberbank given its scale. The Internet giant has partnered with the state bank.
TCS Group acquired 40% of ticket operator Kassir.ru in the summer of 2018. The Tinkoff ecosystem also includes Tinkoff Business (services for small and medium business), Tinkoff Investments, Tinkoff Mortgage (selection and processing of mortgages from partner banks), Tinkoff Mobile (mobile virtual network operator) and Tinkoff Travel (flight and rail bookings, car rentals and hotel deals).
"At this point we're only looking at near-financial needs that are related to transactions from your account or card: ticket purchases, travel, restaurants. Will we go further, and create Tinkoff Taxi, I don't know. Although we can; after all, we now have 8 million clients with whom we communicate very closely. We could simply offer them discounts on our taxis," Tinkov said.