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Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International recently posted dozens of advertisements for Russia-based jobs indicating ambitious plans to grow in the country, in apparent contradiction to its official pledge to exit the market.
The Financial Times has found the offers among more than 2,400 job advertisements posted in Russia by the Austrian lender since December, of which almost 1,500 are for sales management and customer service roles.
One of the job postings, issued by the bank’s unit for medium-sized businesses in Russia, said its “key goals are a multiple expansion of the active client base and stable double-digit income growth”.
Raiffeisen is “looking for a client manager who will attract clients”, reads another offer, from the division targeting small businesses in Russia. Another one notes that the company is “actively expanding our base of corporate clients” for payroll services.
The ads appear to contradict repeated statements by Raiffeisen that it intends to shrink and sell its business in Russia following President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Two years on, the bank is the western lender with the largest operations in Russia. It is under scrutiny by officials at the US Treasury department and has come under pressure from the European Central Bank to pull out of Russia.
Contacted for comment, Raiffeisen said that the FT findings had prompted chief executive Johann Strobl to order an immediate inquiry.
According to a report delivered to Strobl by the board of the bank’s Russian subsidiary, the adverts had been released using boilerplate information about the bank and its ambitions in Russia which had, erroneously, not been updated since before the Ukraine invasion began.
Raiffeisen said in a statement: “The reduction of the Russian business will continue in 2024. Raiffeisen continued to work on a potential transaction, a sale or a spin-off, which would result in the de-consolidation of Raiffeisenbank Russia from the group.”
“The [advertisements] do not reflect the measures taken by RBI to reduce its Russian business, nor do they correspond to the future plans for the Russian business,” it added.
A senior Raiffeisen executive in Austria said the advertisements were “highly embarrassing”, and had triggered a panicked response to have them taken down and urgently rewritten.
Raiffeisen executives stressed they were in a precarious but unavoidable situation: profits made in Russia cannot be repatriated and any sale of their business would need the Kremlin’s approval. At the same time. the bank needs to keep its business in Russia functional in order to attract a buyer, while not overtly supporting the Russian wartime economy.
Raiffeisen has shrunk its lending in Russia and intends to continue doing so: its loan book has decreased by 56 per cent since early 2022. It has also ended all correspondent relationships with other Russian banks.
But among the European banks still operating in Russia and disclosing staff numbers, Raiffeisen is the only one that has increased local headcount over the same period — by 6.6 per cent to 9,942 employees as of December 2023. By comparison, UniCredit, the second-largest western bank in Russia, employed 3,171 staff at the end of 2023 compared with 4,383 two years earlier.
A senior executive at a rival European bank operating in Russia said that Raiffeisen had been poaching its staff in the country across a range of roles and business lines.
Several of the online job postings state that the bank is pursuing a growth strategy in Russia. “To continue to grow we need a strong and united team,” a job offer for a branch manager reads.
Another, for a role in a regional retail team, says it needs someone to “expand the client base, attract new clients; increase the flow of customers” while another indicates a plan to “grow active customer base in core capital markets product areas”.
An anti-money-laundering job notes “ambitious goals to grow business with financial institutions, as well as foreign banks”.
Raiffeisen said the large volume of postings was due to employee retention problems. The bank has to pay outsized salaries and bonuses to retain sales staff at present underworked but who, it says, are needed to be able to sell the business. The market for such staff in Russia was competitive, it said.
The Vienna-based lender also said the headcount increase over two years had been primarily due to an expansion of the local subsidiary’s IT department, which was working to create a standalone IT architecture for the bank ahead of a potential sale. The number of staff working in sales had shrunk since Russia launched its war on Ukraine and would continue to do so, the bank said.
Robert Johnson is a UK-based business writer specializing in finance and entrepreneurship. With an eye for market trends and a keen interest in the corporate world, he offers readers valuable insights into business developments.
