Alfa-Bank and SME Bank signed a cooperation agreement on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum. As part of the agreement, SME Bank joined Alfa-Bank's A-Token platform as an investor to purchase digital financial assets (DFA) of SME companies registered on the service.

A-Token is a blockchain platform for working with digital financial assets, developed by Alfa-Bank. The platform allows all categories of investors to place free liquidity or participate in raising capital. Equivalents of traditional financial instruments in the form of cash claims and fundamentally new investment instruments, which had no analogues on the market before, were issued on A-Token. To date, Alfa-Bank has issued more than 1,300 DFAs worth over 600 billion rubles - this is about 50% of the total volume in Russia, which is more than 1 trillion rubles.

"As one of the active participants and drivers of the digital financial assets market, we understand the importance of forming strategic directions and creating new investment opportunities for clients. We deeply appreciate the participation of institutional investors, such as SME Bank, on the A-Token platform - this is an important segment that adds stability and scale to our ecosystem approach. We believe that such partnerships are becoming a powerful driver for the development of the digital financial assets market and contribute to the creation of new business opportunities," said Denis Kutasov, Head of the Department for Work with Large Corporate Clients at Alfa-Bank.

DFAs give issuers the opportunity to significantly speed up the process of raising capital, do without intermediaries and minimize costs. Also, there are far fewer requirements and restrictions compared to traditional bonds.

"The volume of the digital financial assets market in 2024 has grown several times and everything suggests that the pace of development in this area will not decrease in 2025. The number of public issues of digital financial assets is in the hundreds, and about 20% of the total number are companies in the SME segment. We understand well how the more traditional stock market works, where SME Bank is a co-organizer and anchor investor of half of the issues of the Growth Sector. So, “entering” the digital financial assets market is a consistent and logical step for us. I would also like to note that our agreement with our colleagues from Alfa-Bank is a good example of the unification of financial institutions for the development of new technological solutions that are important for the economy as a whole,” said Ivan Podbereznyak, Chairman of the Board of SME Bank. He also added that the subsidiary bank of the SME Corporation is considering the possibility of issuing its own digital financial assets on the A-Token,” said Ivan Podbereznyak, Chairman of the Board of SME Bank. He also added that the subsidiary bank of the SME Corporation is considering the possibility of issuing its own digital financial assets on the A-Token.

The flexibility of digital financial assets allows organizing the placement for both a wide audience of investors and for a targeted circle of people. The organization of “closed” placements of digital financial assets based on the register of investors allows issuers to collect club placements from private or corporate investors and optimize intra-group cash management.