Yandex.Money

» see money.yandex.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

yandex.money never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a russian-language e-wallet that lived inside the yandex stack and got used for the russian-language web. i was paying for things in turkish lira through bkm-express and later through iyzico, the russian payment rails ran on a different track.

the service launched in 2002 as a joint venture between yandex, the russian search company, and paycash, an electronic-money operator from saint petersburg. yandex held the brand name and the user-facing product, paycash brought the licensing and the back-end. by the mid 2000s yandex.money was the standard checkout option across the russian-language web, the way russian users paid utilities and ran online checkout.

sberbank, russia's largest bank, bought 75% of the joint venture in july 2013 for about sixty million dollars. yandex kept a 25% stake and the right to keep the brand on the wallet for several more years. for most russian users that ownership shuffle was invisible, the checkout button still said yandex.money. roughly.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the sberbank buyout ~

the full takeover landed in summer 2020. sberbank acquired the remaining 25% from yandex in june and closed the deal in july. as part of the same restructuring sberbank ended the joint venture with yandex on taxi and food-delivery too. the wallet would no longer carry the yandex name.

yandex.money relaunched as yoomoney in late july 2020. the user accounts and wallet balances carried over, the api kept working with a redirect from money.yandex.ru. the eighteen-year brand was the part that died, the underlying service kept running under new ownership.

~ what got buried with it ~

the yandex.money death was an early sign of the wider unwind that would come for yandex in 2022. when the february 2022 sanctions hit yandex and the company was forced to split its russian-facing media properties off to vk, the precedent for that kind of state-aligned asset shuffle had already been set in the 2020 sberbank deal. close enough.

the eighteen-year run of the yandex.money brand mapped onto the rise of the russian commercial internet, anyway. by then the russian web had built native payment habits around the yandex.money button, the yoomoney rebrand kept those habits alive on a different brand-mark.

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