Online charity in Russia—fintech as a driver: Yandex.Checkout study

August 20, 2018

Charity trend in Russia is driven by local boost of payment technologies: the number of Russians donating online to charity and crowdfunding sites has increased by 40% in the first six months of 2018 in comparison to the same period of 2017.

Donating money online with a bank/credit card is one of the most popular methods of giving—it was 34% of all donations in Russia in 2017, according to the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF). Cashless transactions volume is growing in Russia, and this trend has a positive effect on charity.

As Yandex.Checkout analysts report, the total amount of online donations significantly increased within a year: for the first six months of 2018 Russians have given to charity 25% more than they did for the same period in 2017.

Yandex.Checkout, Russia’s leading payment provider according to MARC 2018 report, and thus the processor of most online charitable payments, has analyzed online charity trends and Russians’ giving behavior in 2017-2018.

While the number of contributions has grown, the average donation amount has decreased by 10% all over the country in 2018, according to Yandex.Checkout calculations. However, Russians seem to become more active philanthropists in 2018: the average amount of annual donations per individual is 4 in comparison to 3 in 2017.

Meanwhile there is a growth in average checks of charitable payments from residents of the most populated cities in Russia (with more a million people).

Analytics is based on donations via Yandex.Money & Yandex.Checkout charity tools in the first six months of 2018 in comparison to the same period of 2017. Yandex.Checkout cooperates with a number of charity foundations worldwide, and provides a variety of methods to donate money: online charitable fundraising tools—ready-made fundraising pages, forms and buttons constructing into websites—and special crowdfunding service yasobe.ru.

According to the CAF and YouGov report, more than half of Russians have donated money for the twelve months in 2017 (53%), either by giving money to a charity, to a church/religious organisation, or by sponsoring someone. Supporting children is the most popular cause for Russians to have donated to (58%).

——

About Yandex.Checkout

Yandex.Checkout is the leading service for accepting online payments in Russia, according to a 2018 survey by MARC. Yandex.Checkout received the Emerging Payment Award at the Merchant Payments Ecosystem conference (Berlin) in 2017. With this payment solution, merchants from all over the world can offer Russian consumers the online payment methods most popular among Russians and CIS-citizens: bank cards, e-wallets, mobile phones, cash via mobile retailers and payment kiosks (there are over 250 thousand cash-acceptance points all over CIS). Currently, more than 90,000 online stores across the globe use Yandex.Checkout.

Yandex.Checkout was launched by Yandex.Money in 2013. Yandex.Money is the joint venture of search engine Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX), and Sberbank, the largest bank in Russia. Yandex.Money also offers consumers easy, safe, and reliable methods of paying online on its own site and mobile app. The service hosts about 35 million user accounts. Yandex.Money is the largest electronic payments service in Russia, according to a 2017 survey by Mediascope.