Austrian banking group Raiffeisen has finalised a deal with Russia’s BIN Group to sell its pension fund business.

The move comes as Raiffeisen Bank International’s subsidiary AO Raiffeisenbank aims to concentrate on its core banking business.

Sergey Monin, chairman of the board at the Russian Raiffeisen subsidiary, noted in a statement that the Russian pension fund market was currently in a phase of consolidation, where larger players were growing stronger.

One of those is the BIN group, which already comprises several pension funds and will grow its member base by another 200,000 with the current purchase.

The ZAO NPF Raiffeisen has more than €550m in assets under management, as of the end of June.

Established in 2004, its asset base has “more than quadrupled” in rouble terms over the last three years.

According to Russian financial blog moneyinf.com.ru, ZAO NPF Raiffeisen is the last pension fund in the Russian market managed by a foreign provider, as others run by ING and Allianz were sold in recent years.

The authors speculate that the continually changing regulatory landscape in Russia been a contributing factor in their departure.

The BIN group now has five pension funds under management, including European Pension Fund, Trust, Education and Science and IET, with combined total assets of more than RUB100bn (€2bn), according to the blog.

These will now be combined under a single platform, as reported by IPE.  

Over the first half year, Russian pension funds reported a 10% return on average. 

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