According to Roman Marishkin, director at Alfa Bank’s corporate sales department, a salary project involves a number of benefits for a bank. Among those are commission income from both individuals and companies, and the opportunity to attract cheap money, which is a balance of salary accounts and also an additional channel for cross sales of other products – credits, for example.

However, it will be difficult for the bank to perform well in the market without a base of corporate clients, says Mikhail Matovnikov, CEO at Interfax – Center for Economic Analysis. As of August 1, corporate loans comprised just 9% of HCFB’s total loan portfolio, or 6.7 billion roubles, which compares to 85%, or 80.2 billion roubles, in Vozrozhdenie Bank and 19%, or 10.7 billion roubles, in OTP Bank.

Mark Nakhmanovich, deputy head of the board at Vozrozhdenie Bank, also says these are the companies that most often join such projects:

“Namely the companies that are corporate clients of a bank usually join salary projects.”

Valery Torkhov, deputy head of Bank Avangard’s board, says that usually once a company becomes a bank’s corporate client it has to affect almost all of its financial operations, including those with its employees’ salaries, through the bank – creditor, with virtually no chance left to choose another bank for a salary project.

Among the tools to compete with universal players, Home Credit plans to offer flexible rates and additional interest of around 3-7% for the account balances.