Established in 1841, Sberbank has grown into a universal commercial bank with diversified businesses. Sberbank provides banking services to individuals and all types of corporate clients including big corporates, small and medium-sized businesses as well as state-owned, sub-federal units and municipalities. Building mutually advantageous relations with all clients is Sberbank's driver of success. More than 100 million individual customers bank with Sberbank (> 70% of the Russian population) and about 1 million of businesses (out of 4.5 million legal entities in Russia).

 In the corporate segment, Sberbank serves all types of businesses with small and medium-sized companies accounting for over 20% of the Bank's corporate loan portfolio and the rest presented by lending to large and largest corporate clients. The Bank is also active in deposit–taking, settlement services, project, trade and export finance, cash management and other core banking activities. Through the integration with Troika Dialog, which was subsequently renamed Sberbank Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB), Sberbank started offering high-end financial advisory services and a selection of investment solutions including structured products, ECM, DCM, M&A and operations on global markets.

In recent years, Sberbank has substantially extended its international presence beyond CIS - Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus – to nine countries of Central and Eastern Europe via Sberbank Europe AG (former VBI) and Turkey via acquisition of DenizBank. The latter was acquired in September 2012 and represents the largest acquisition in Sberbank's 170-year history. Sberbank also has representative offices in Germany and China, a branch in India and operates Sberbank Switzerland AG.