Monobank moved data centers from Kiev to Lviv and to the Amazon Cloud

Ukrainian online bank monobank has removed its data centers from Kiev. In particular, part to Lviv, and another part — to Amazon cloud services, co-owner of the company Oleg Gorokhovsky said in an interview with Forbes. Here are the most interesting moments from his conversation.

In particular, Gorokhovsky said that in the first days of the full — scale war, it was difficult for the bank to provide replenishment of cards, because the key partner — the IBox network of self-service terminals-faced difficulties in collection. And the branches of partner banks were closed.

"Our two data centers in Kiev no longer seemed like a reliable configuration. We decided to transfer some of the processing capacity to the cloud, Amazon Services, and the rest to the data center in Lviv. This is an extremely complex project, and we conducted it in parallel with the current work, without stopping," he said.

According to him, it was a very difficult it Task.

"We moved to Lviv with server capacity and an operational day, and moved back-and-forth applications and processing to Amazon. Amazon is the most expensive story. On our volumes, it costs about 2 200 thousand per month. And we will most likely" move" from the cloud to Lviv, " Gorokhovsky announced.

At the same time, he noted that the bank is also considering the option of moving to one of the Eastern European countries.

It is known that march was the first unprofitable month for monobank in many months. In particular, a loss of half a billion "ate" all profit for the first quarter, leaving a minus of UAH 110 million.

At the same time, in the first days of the war, the bank received about UAH 2.8 billion in refinancing from the NBU secured by government bonds. However, this money was not needed and was subsequently returned, Gorokhovsky assured.

He also said that more than 1.3 million people used the credit limits of 10 thousand UAH. also, more than 70% of customers, despite the credit holidays (the ability not to make a mandatory monthly payment on the loan), continued to pay and fulfilled their obligations in April.

According to him, it was necessary to form about UAH 1 billion of reserves in March — this is all that was earned in the first quarter.

Gorokhovsky also said that the bank has a large increase in account balances — about UAH 10 billion.

"But when we started selling war bonds, we saw how much the rate affects customers plus an impressive level of patriotism — in five days our clients bought war bonds worth more than UAH 230 million," he said, adding that the bank does not plan to raise funds for government bonds from non — residents.

As the co-owner of monobank emphasized, there are no offers for sale now, because "buying banks during the war is very reckless, this is a real roulette game, and investors are not reckless."

"In the future, I would very much like to see myself in a prosperous Ukraine, in mono, with 10 million customers... And so that Russia will definitely follow their ship. Sooner or later this will happen," Gorokhovsky concluded.

As you know, as of May 7, 2022, monobank has 5.8 million users, which is 800 thousand more than at the end of 2021. Only state-owned Oschadbank and PrivatBank have more active customers.

Earlier, monobank had the opportunity to purchase government war bonds (government bonds): both short-term and long-term.

Monobank has closed the accounts of customers who are currently located in Russia, Belarus, Syria, Eritrea and North Korea since April 18, 2022.