In a bucolic village on the outskirts of Moscow sits a Palo Alto-style campus. Built with discoloured brownish Italian marble, the result of workers laying the stone too quickly as they rushed to finish before a planned visit by President Vladimir Putin, it is an unlikely place to hatch a plan to reform Russia.
But that is the aim of Herman Gref, chief executive of the state-owned Sberbank, who is trying to use technology and western management techniques to drag the company, and with it Russia, into the modern world. Employees regularly visit the campus, which serves as the bank's Corporate University, for study programmes designed by Insead as well as Sberbank's own courses. They include virtual reality sessions that simulate being an elderly man with glaucoma struggling to pay a bill in one of Sberbank's more than 16,000 branches.
In his nearly 11 years running the Kremlin's largest lender — with total assets of Rbs25.8tn ($390bn) — Mr Gref's full-throttle focus on the future has transformed Sberbank. Once considered moribund and corrupt, even by Russian standards, Sberbank was thought to be beyond saving. A decade later, even Kremlin critics such as the opposition leader Alexei Navalny praise the bank's efforts at reform.
Despite having been under US and EU sanctions that limit access to international debt markets since 2014, the bank has posted four record-breaking quarters out of six in recent years. Its record Rbs749bn profit last year accounted for most of the revenue in an otherwise troubled state-owned banking sector.
Its previous incarnation as the Soviet Union's savings monopoly has given Sberbank natural advantages. It retains a near stranglehold on the retail market, holding 46 per cent of deposits and servicing 110m customers, and is majority-owned by the Russian central bank, which has no intention of privatising it.
But Mr Gref's success, colleagues say, comes from leveraging Sberbank's huge resources to show that sweeping liberal reforms are possible in Russia, where state-dominated cronyism has taken root during Mr Putin's 18-year reign. "It's absolutely do-able if you have the resources, the people and the tech. And it happened randomly because this German guy Gref happened to come along," says one former bank executive.
A Putin adviser since the 1990s, Mr Gref says Sberbank's model offers Russia a way out of its dependence on oil and gas. "If structural reforms happen and economic growth is higher, then we could achieve even more significant results," he says. "Imagine if economic growth was 4 per cent instead of 2. Our retail [business] would go up 22 per cent and our corporate bloc would grow 12-13 per cent."
But, say allies, the path he has taken Sberbank on has not been followed by Russia. "It's a parallel universe," the former executive says. "There's no demand for it. We did a gazillion governance sessions at the monthly oligarch meetings and most people just wrote us off as quirky."
Now, the Kremlin backing that underwrote Sberbank's success is threatening to turn into a millstone around its neck. The existing sanctions have effectively ended Mr Gref's plans to expand in the west, while the US is considering new sanctions against Russia that would blacklist state banks. "Our US shareholders are our best lobbyists," an executive says. "But geopolitics limit what we can do."
The child of an ethnic German family exiled to central Asia by Stalin, Mr Gref, 54, grew up in Soviet Kazakhstan and Siberia before moving to St Petersburg to study law in 1990. His supervisor Anatoly Sobchak, a leading figure in Russia's democratic movement, became mayor a year later and brought him into the city government, where he worked alongside Mr Putin and other future top officials.
Appointed economy minister by Mr Putin in 2000, Mr Gref became a leading advocate for liberal reforms. He successfully pushed for a 13 per cent flat tax rate — a landmark measure at a time when evasion was rife. The ministry began privatising several state companies and lobbied for Russia to join the World Trade Organization, which it eventually did in 2011.
By Mr Putin's second term, however, the impetus for the reform agenda had subsided. "After 2004 it was obvious that the wind was changing. Russia was hit by this golden rain: oil prices were going up, the budget and economy were growing exponentially," says Andrei Sharonov, then a deputy to Mr Gref at the ministry, now dean of Skolkovo business school. "There was this euphoria where people thought there had been enough reforms and things started moving in the other direction."
Current and former colleagues of Mr Gref portray his move to Sberbank as an attempt to show the Kremlin that reform is possible, and scaleable. "We have this slogan inside the bank: 'when we change Sberbank, we change the country','" says Lev Khasis, Sberbank's first deputy chief executive.
Sberbank's position is so dominant that its lending rates essentially dictate conditions to the whole market. But its situation when Mr Gref arrived was dire.
"In April 2008 we didn't have any [financial] numbers for the previous year," says a Sberbank executive. "There were papers lying all around the office, the printer didn't work, it smelt of old people, and there were posters of [2008 Eurovision Song Contest winner] Dima Bilan on the walls. They were losing market share to everyone, but they were happy to let it go."
Having visited Sberbank branches across Russia, Mr Gref was shocked by the long lines and surly service — a hangover from the Soviet era. Its vast operations ran on nearly 3,000 different IT systems, meaning it could often only serve clients in the branch where they opened their account.
It was also haemorrhaging money. Made up of 18 separate banks across Russia, its regional managers essentially ran their own small fiefdoms and gave out loans with little or no central supervision. The bank could hardly have tracked them if it had wanted to — it had fewer than 50 risk managers at its headquarters.
"Pre-Gref, the business model was: you give a loan to a friendly oligarch, that oligarch buys shares, the shares go up, and the oligarch gets the profits," a former adviser to Mr Gref says. These cozy relationships were ended and below-market interest rates axed as the regional managers were brought to heel.
Mr Gref's personal relationship with Mr Putin allows him to turn down pet projects that benefit special interests rather than the bank, the former adviser says. "He can say 'no' to many deals that [other state banks] cannot."
To reassure investors that Sberbank's corporate governance had improved, Mr Gref put Mr Navalny, then an activist shareholder campaigning against corruption in state companies, on a minorities' rights board. "It's one of the few places where everyone works for the state, but they don't avoid me like the plague," Mr Navalny told the Financial Times.
Mr Gref cuts a figure that is part futurist tech executive, part Soviet bureaucrat. From an elite suburb in western Moscow, he drives a Tesla to work; executives had it imported as a present for his birthday. Meetings are regularly held in English, even though Mr Gref only began learning it aged 40. "He's a benign, well intentioned dictator," says one colleague of Mr Gref's highly centralised leadership style. "He can do whatever he wants. He knows the chairman of the board isn't the one who appoints him."
In meetings, colleagues and counterparties say, Mr Gref can be volatile to the point of shouting. "He has the führer complex. He's used to adulation and he gets it," says a person close to the head of a rival state bank. Appointments can be held up for months without his personal approval and he can overturn executives' schedules without warning if government talks drag on or his views change.
"It's the slowest, most bureaucratic, inefficient organisation you can imagine. His day begins at noon, he's in the Kremlin half the day and the guys [staff] have to wait around until the middle of the night," one senior western banker says.
Yet among Russia's elite, Mr Gref is also one of the Kremlin's strongest critics. In 2016, he said that unless it reformed the country was doomed to be an economic "downshifter" because of its stagnant growth and over-reliance on oil and gas exports. He can be even more combative behind closed doors, say people who have worked with him.
Mr Khasis, a former Walmart executive, is leading the effort to create the non-banking "ecosystem" that will see Sberbank diversify into sectors ranging from medical services to cyber security, and develop an ecommerce joint venture with Yandex that Mr Gref calls the "Russian Amazon". With 36m regular users, the Sberbank payments app is frequently used as a cash substitute in Russia's remotest regions.
At his job interview in 2013, Mr Khasis says, Mr Gref shared fears that tech companies' forays into payments would see the bank suffer the same fate as Kodak, which once had a 90 per cent share of the camera market before its collapse. But Sberbank aims to leverage its customer base to enter new sectors.
"If you look at [Sberbank statements] our mission is to make people feel safe and secure and help them realise their hopes and dreams. There's not a word in there about lending them money or our being a bank," Mr Khasis says.
To encourage this cultural shift, Mr Gref organises an annual trip for executives to Silicon Valley where they study at Stanford University's business school and visit start-ups. Motivational speakers and even an Indian guru have also been deployed to address employees.
But some of his techniques are much less orthodox. For a time, executives' bonus pay was directly tied to weight-loss goals set by Mr Gref. Some employees tore muscles in the gym. One became a vegan. Another lost 25kg to save his bonus. Mr Gref once reprimanded Nikolai Tsekhomsky, former head of Sberbank's finance department, for not listening to an audiobook on the treadmill in the bank's executive gym. "We agreed on personal weight KPI [key performance indicators] and I met them. Herman Oskarovich [Mr Gref] was satisfied with my progress," Mr Tsekhomsky says.
Those close to Mr Gref say his eccentricities are key to understanding his ambition. "You have to be a maniac like Gref and live and breathe technology 24/7, otherwise it doesn't work," says one.
Executives point to the Kremlin's new Rbs2.8tn "digital economy" initiative as a sign that Sberbank's model is finally seeping through. A longstanding rumour that Mr Putin would tap Mr Gref to implement a reform programme, however, is yet to come true. "He [Mr Gref] ruined relationships with so many people [in the Kremlin] that he knows he can't go back," a senior banker close to a hardline member of Mr Putin's entourage says.
In May, Mr Gref fired top analyst Alex Fak over a report that accused the management at oil and gas group Gazprom of running its capital expenditure programme to benefit contractors — Mr Putin's old friends from St Petersburg. Mr Gref apologised for the report, which he said was done "unprofessionally".
Investors criticised the move, accusing Sberbank of ceding its independence. People close to Mr Gref say the scandal was emblematic of his difficult act balancing good governance with loyalty to Mr Putin. "The researchers did their job. Gref wasn't willing or able to protect them," one says.
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As a state-owned company, Sberbank is also vulnerable to geopolitical blowback. Investor support — about 20 per cent of its shareholders are US-based — suffers when other companies are targeted for US sanctions: the bank's share price fell nearly 20 per cent in April during a mass sell-off. Russians have withdrawn more than $1bn in retail deposits from Sberbank since US senators introduced a bill in August that could, if implemented, cut the state lenders out of the dollar system and put them on a blacklist for all transactions with Americans.
But Mr Khasis says the real threat is to Sberbank's reform mission rather than its bottom line. "When the western world doesn't want Russia to go westwards, it makes things harder for us," he says. "If you build a fence around Russia, where else are we going to live?"