Edenlab

History

2020: Transfer of department of digital banking of Raiffeisenbank to Ukraine

On June 10, 2020 it became known that the Raiffeisen Bank International Group dismissed IT department in Austria under the authority of which there were applications of digital banking, and submitted its cases to the Ukrainian startup of Edenlab. The management of group does not open actual reasons of this step, but is going to involve former employees of the Austrian department in other projects.

According to the edition, RBI in 2019 set a goal on reduction of the staff of IT specialists and decrease in the expenses. The organization of the small development teams capable to quicker create new products and to develop available became the first step in this direction. It led to the fact that global scale the IT department of group was separated into 30 small departments.

Representatives of RBI do not comment on the fact of dissolution of the Vienna IT group on digital banking. Her employees were notified on termination of work still on May 25, 2020.

The command in the Austrian capital created applications under the general name Digital Banking Engine. In its structure 45 people worked, 33 of which were internal employees of RBI.

To 33 IT specialists of RBI as the representative of group Ingrid Krenn-Ditz reported, will offer these work on other projects, but it did not provide any additional details. To the remained 12 third-party members of the Vienna command of developers RBI she intends to find work in group too, but at the time of the publication of material it was not known whether their jobs were saved behind them.

The command of the Ukrainian startup Edenlab founded by Marina Kvashinoy and located in Kiev will get to work on projects of the Vienna developers. According to Der Standard, RBI calls a basic reason of the choice of this company existence at it of work experience in retail and IT.

The edition separately notes that transfer of development from Vienna to Kiev pursued one more aim. This step will allow RBI to reduce costs in addition. Other reasons of transfer to Ukraine are not stated yet as RBI have a subsidiary bank not only in Ukraine, but also in 14 other countries of Eastern Europe.

Staff of Der Standard assumed that cooperation of RBI with Edenlab can lead to purchase of this financial technical-startup in the near future. Representatives of group did not respond to the request of the edition.

Against the background of plans of RBI for reduction of total number of IT specialists the Russian Raiffeisenbank entering into RBI and working since 1996, on the contrary, within several years increased their staff. As reported CNews, from 2016 to September, 2019 the number of IT employees of the bank grew up three times.

By the end of September, 2019. The IT staff of bank expanded up to 1500 people. Enrollment took place within technology transformation — transition to the Agile model. Hiring was carried out among IT specialists of all profiles.

Since the beginning of 2019 in bank more than 150 developers, over 70 testers, more than 60 systems analysts and over 60 specialists in engineering, including technical support were employed. A part of the recruited specialists was employed in Omsk where the bank has a Raiffeisen Tech Center IT center. In the center the end-to-end teams of development and IT support of products were formed.^[1]

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