Yandex.Checkout (aka Yandex.Kassa), the B2B branch of Yandex.Money which is part of Russia’s leading online company Yandex, together with state-owned retail banking giant Sberbank, have launched “B2B Payments,” a service intended for companies to accept online payments from corporate clients as easily as from individuals, reports East-West Digital News (EWDN).

The service (which can be activated only via Yandex.Checkout) automates invoice generation and makes online payment a quick and easy operation.

According to Anatoly Popov, Deputy Chairman of the Board at Sberbank, “the B2B Payments service radically changes the idea of the payment for products by companies.”

“The process of an online purchase for a business becomes identical to that for a regular customer: the client simply selects the desired product and payment method, clicks a button, proceeds to the online bank where they find an already completed payment order. All they need to do is sign and send a payment. The store is notified about the payment immediately,” he explained.

Thus, the time required to process a B2B payment is reduced “from 1–3 days to 1–3 minutes.”

The Yandex.Money press service said that B2B Payments is the first online payment technology of this kind in Russia, and that they “know no analogues in other countries.”

“Sberbank was the first among Russian banks to develop a special API for B2B payments, and Yandex.Checkout became the first aggregator to make such payments available to millions of organizations,” notes Yandex.Money CEO Ivan Glazachev.

B2B Payments is already available to companies with a settlement account at Sberbank. This concerns 2 million companies, and nearly one third of all Russia’s micro-, small, and medium enterprises, according to Yandex.Money, which cites data from the Federal Tax Service. Mobile operators, HR companies, IT companies, players from the commodity sector are among the first users of the service.

“Potentially,” the service will be made available to “all Russian organizations that work with corporate clients.”

Yandex.Checkout‘s core business is to provide e-merchants with online payment solutions. The company is number one in this field in Russia, according to a 2018 survey by MARC, and claims to serve more than 90,000 online stores across the globe.

Yandex.Money is a major payment operator co-owned by Sberbank and Yandex, the Russian search giant. Its B2C service hosts some 35 million user accounts.