T-Investments: Three Years Defending the Broker Idea

Pavel Permyakov is CTO of T-Investments, Russia's largest broker by retail clients. It has roughly thirty million open accounts, with multiple accounts per client. He has spent thirteen years at T-Bank; programming began with Logo's turtle, Pascal, his older brother, and neighbors in technology.

Ten years at Neoflex gave Pavel experience as a developer and architect across projects for several banks. He joined T-Bank on his second attempt to work on an integration bus and later helped move toward microservices. An early experiment was a notification platform built with Ruby on Rails, Spring, and Rancher.

The investment idea was promoted for about three years before a small team validated it with BCS. Once demand was clear, the company needed its own license, core systems, and a mass-market product. Vendor solutions accelerated launch but created scaling and availability problems, forcing the team to rebuild parts in flight.

Growth was close to exponential: about 50 people became 200, then 400, and eventually around 800. Pavel explains becoming CTO, managing six deputies, preparing decisions or making them asynchronously, and turning strategy into delegated work whose impact is checked. His advice is to choose engaging work and seek solutions that can scale.