As the Russian successor entity of the State Labor Savings Banks System of the USSR, it was called Sberbank of Russia until 2015,[9] and in 2020 further shortened its brand to Sber.

[10] Following the termination of its operations in the European Union in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, its international footprint is primarily in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

[citation needed] On 16 December 2013, Volksbank (Ukraine), which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Sberbank, changed its name to VS Bank [uk] (Ukrainian: ВіЕс Банк).

[20] After the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia in 2014, the Obama administration imposed targeted sanctions on 12 September 2014, through the US Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) by adding Sberbank and other entities to the Sectoral Sanctions Identifications (SSI) List.

[36] Sberbank together with other Russian banks filed claims with the highest EU court to lift the punitive economic measures.

[citation needed] On 27 August 2014, Switzerland imposed sanctions on Sberbank and other Russian financial institutions.

Kuznetsov noted that these are programs for fraudsters to remotely access a smartphone to steal passwords and bank card numbers.

In July 2024, Russian FIT LLC, the developer of the PayQR contactless payment service, filed a lawsuit against Sberbank in the Moscow Arbitration Court.

[63] On August 16, Sberbank disclosed for the first time in three years the amount spent on remuneration of top management and key executives.

In addition to changing the logo and legalizing the reduction "Sber", the company announced the transformation of the bank into an "ecosystem".

Sberbank decided to become "more than a bank" and began to develop various services, mainly digital: online cinema (Okko), music (SberSound), food delivery (SberMarket), cloud storage (SberDisk), taxi (Citymobil).

However, in the spring of 2021, the parties decided to end cooperation due to disagreements over management methods and corporate culture.

[68] After price liberalization in the early 1990s, the state and Sberbank effectively abandoned guarantees to secure citizens' deposits,[69] as a result of their depreciation, which, according to sociological surveys, caused a sharp dissatisfaction of the population.

[72] The law on full compensation of deposits taking into account changes in the real value of the ruble was adopted in 1995, but since 2003 the start of payments has been regularly postponed.

[84][99][100][101] Following Gorkov's departure, Svetlana Alekseyevna Sagaydak (Russian: Светлана Алексеевна Cагайдак) became the new Senior Vice Chairman of the Board.

[103][104] In February 2022, Sverbank announced foundation of its own e-commerce holding, headed by its former top-manager Lev Khasis but in a week on Feb 22,2022 he left Sberbank.

[114] Sberbank Switzerland was sold in September 2022 to m3 Groupe Holding SA and will trade as TradeXBank AG in future.

[116] On 29 December 2022 Sberbank CIB (UK) Ltd and SIB (Cyprus) Limited were removed as member firms of the London Stock Exchange.

[119] In October 2023, Sberbank launched a line of Islamic finance products: the Adafa interest-free card and the Amana account, which complies with the AAOIFI standard.

[128] During Russia's transition to a market economy in the 1990s, in which these assets were sold, Sberbank provided no guarantee for citizens' deposits.

[132] The law of 1995 assumed that in 2003 the repayment of debts to the population would begin, taking into account the real value of the ruble at the current moment.

Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky accused numerous persons and entities of laundering stolen money in tax fraud in a Hermitage Capital Management case [ru] in Russia.

[139] Owned by Denis Katsyv, Prevezon Holdings, represented by Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya and Louis Freeh, paid $6 million to resolve the claim without admitting any crime which subsequently led to all charges being dropped by the Justice Department in the summer of 2017.

[139][140][141][a] In United States court, Sergey P. Poymanov (Russian: Сергей Пойманов), a Voronezh-based businessman, sued Sberbank, several of its subsidiaries and executives, and a business rival for 750 million rubles, claiming that a valuable granite gravel quarry he owned was illegally bankrupted and seized by the bank in a corporate raid in 2012.

[139][146] He was charged with alleged embezzlement of company's money amounting to almost 1 billion rubles (about USD$11 million) as a part of Bankruptcy fraud.

[147] In April 2014, several Ukrainian officials accused Sberbank of funding the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine, including alleged terrorism.

[148] "It is another instance of aggressive nationalism of neo-Nazi dogma that is gathering momentum in Ukraine and obviously enjoys support of official authorities of the country," the Russian foreign ministry stated.

The question is whether we will be given a permission to sell or not by Ukrainian authorities," Herman Gref who is the chairman of Sberbank said on the World Economic Forum held in Davos in January 2018.

[150][151][152][153] In October 2019, it was revealed that analysts from cybersecurity firm DeviceLock had shared information about a large Sberbank data breach with the newspaper, the Kommersant.