Russia eyes switching to digital signing of contracts at auctions

The Central Bank of Russia intends to transfer from paper to electronic form the signing of contracts based on the results of procurement procedures by 2023, Director of the Procurement Department of the Central Bank Maria Timoshenko said in an interview with TASS, Report informs.

“We wanted to do this even earlier and set the horizon until the end of 2020, but then we came to the conclusion that it is advisable to implement the project on a larger scale: not only for procurement, but also for the contract activity as a whole. Therefore, we revised the horizon, most likely this will be in 2023,” she said.

Timoshenko clarified that now the agreement is signed on paper, but the whole process of approval is already taking place in electronic form. Also, meetings of procurement commissions were transferred to a remote and absentee format.

The Central Bank of the Russian Federation conducts procurement procedures at the electronic site ‘Sber A’ (Sberbank-AST CJSC).