Sberbank’s second pirouette

TECH FIRMS with ropy business models are told to “pivot”—abruptly reinvent themselves in the hope that a new approach generates profits before venture capital runs out. YouTube is celebrated in business schools for hurriedly switching from a dating service to video-sharing; Slack ditched online gaming for corporate chat. Agile repositioning is not confined to Silicon Valley. In Russia the hustle to come up with the next tech darling has emerged from an unlikely quarter. Sberbank, once the Soviet Union’s sclerotic retail-savings monopoly, is ploughing billions of dollars into consumer technology. It is pitching clients digital services from food delivery to music streaming. Driverless cars and e-commerce will be next. Can the former spiritual home of financial bureaucracy, still majority-owned by the government, reinvent itself as Russia’s Netflix, Google and Amazon rolled into one?