In January 2024, the inaugural cohort of the international School of Reporting and Financial Data, a collaborative project between the Reporting and Financial Data Department of VTB Bank and the Center for Research in Market Efficiency and Applied Finance of the Graduate School of Management at St. Petersburg State University, was completed:

•  More than 550 students registered for the online intensive;
• More than 200 people have fully completed their training and received School participant certificates;
• Geography of participants: Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan;
• Listeners rated the program as a whole at 4.83/5.

Participants highly appreciated the format of paired webinars “lecturer at GSOM SPbU + expert from the Bank”, the relevance of business cases from VTB on banking specifics and effective interaction with project curators. “The examples are real-life, and not elementary and unambiguous, as in ordinary educational materials,” listeners shared their feedback.

The School of Reporting and Financial Data is an online intensive course for students and young professionals in the field of international finance, implemented by GSOM SPbU together with VTB Bank on the VTB Education online platform. Over the course of 5 weeks, participants studied 5 IFRS topics:

•  Conceptual framework of IFRS,
• Intangible assets: research and development,
• Control concept,
• Business acquisition (consolidation),
• Associated companies and joint activities.

 On each topic, participants were treated to practical webinars from teachers-practitioners of the master's program "Master in Corporate Finance - MCF" of GSOM St. Petersburg State University Maria Rybakova and Oksana Kuklina, as well as master classes on banking cases and the specifics of IFRS for financial organizations from experts from the Department reporting and financial data of VTB Bank: Natalia Lukasheva, Maria Kravtsova, Natalia Ivanova and Sergei Volkov.

 “The experience of the VTB Reporting and Financial Data Department is often considered by the professional financier community as an example of best practices. Thanks to a joint project with VTB Education and GSOM St. Petersburg State University, we began to systematize our expertise into a product that has already begun to benefit the qualitative development of the younger generation of specialists in the field of IFRS,” shared Natalya Surova, head of the Financial Department of VTB Bank.

 The top 15 participants of the School included employees of VTB Bank: the parent organization and the group’s perimeter companies, as well as students of the Graduate School of Management of St. Petersburg State University.

  In 2024, it is planned to launch new streams of the School with the study of new topics and applied problems in the field of finance.