OREANDA-NEWS. July 03, 2014. Sberbank of Russia (hereafter “Sberbank”) has organized a Financial Forum inside the frameworks of the first Russian-Chinese EXPO, which has become one of the main events of the EXPO’s business program.

Members of the Forum included: Maxim Shereykin, Deputy Minister for Development of the Far East, Sun Yao, Deputy Governor of the Heilongjiang Province, Ling Ji, Director General of the Department of European-Central Asian Affairs, Chang Di, Plenipotentiary ambassador-minister of the Chinese embassy in Russia and Alexey Gruzdev, Russia's trade representative in China. Sberbank was represented at the Forum by: Evgeny Gavrilenkov, Chief Economist at Sberbank CIB, Alexander Abramkin, Deputy Chairman of Sberbank of Russia's Baikal Bank, Marina Perebeinus, Deputy Chairman of Sberbank of Russia’s Dalnevostochny Bank, and Evgeny Kaplin, Managing Director, Senior Banker at Trade Finance and Correspondent Banking Department.

As for the Chinese side, among the speakers at the Forum were members of senior management from several major Chinese banks, including: Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, China Construction Bank, China Development Bank, Bank of Harbin and China Export & Credit Insurance Corporation (SINOSURE). The Forum brought together a total of 18 Chinese commercial banks from across Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong Province and Shanghai.

Opening the Forum, Sergey Tsyplakov, the representative of Sberbank in China, stressed the important role the Chinese financial market plays in the international strategy of Sberbank. Sberbank therefore considers the Forum to be an important step in its efforts to find an effective business model for the Chinese market.

The main topics discussed at the Forum were scaling up of trade finance, the increase in payments in national currencies and Sberbank’s role in the implementation of investment cooperation between enterprises and companies of the two participating countries. Sun Yao, Deputy Governor of the Heilongjiang Province, said that in recent years the two countries' cooperation in the financial sector has achieved significant progress, but that it still does not entirely fulfill the needs of members for complete trade and economic cooperation between the two countries. In addition, Sun Yao expressed his hope that the proactive work of Russia's largest bank - Sberbank of Russia - would help bring bilateral financial cooperation to a new high-quality level.