Sberbank Life Insurance
How an insurance company with 700+ employees replaced its self-hosted system with Pachca running as hybrid on-premise (BYOK)
About the company
Sberbank Life Insurance is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sberbank and part of its Wealth Management division. It specializes in risk, savings and investment life insurance programs and leads the Russian life insurance market. In 2025, it collected more than 1 trillion rubles in insurance premiums (according to ОСБУ), and its assets totaled 1.429 trillion rubles as of December 31, 2025.
Life before Pachca
Before Pachca, all of our internal communication ran through a Russian team chat app built around enhanced security. We had no concerns about data protection. Our concerns were about usability and an interface that looked outdated.
On top of that, it was hard to build real automations in that app. We couldn't connect our conversations to the company's internal services.
So our goal for the rollout was clear: we needed a modern team chat app with a fresh interface, threads and an open API.
The moment we knew Pachca was the one
Since a high level of security for a cloud product remained one of our key criteria, choosing a tool took a long time. We looked at different products on the market and kept coming back to the discussion.
We were moving from a self-hosted system running inside our company's network to a tech-forward team chat app. BYOK turned out to be the deciding factor: data is encrypted with our own keys, and the provider has no access to it. That's what let us replace classic on-premise with hybrid on-premise (BYOK). After that, features already built into the product came in handy: a DLP system, token management, API polling and separate internal and external file access.
So the decision came down to a combination of things: the right deployment model, extensive automation options, a full set of communication tools and a modern, easy-to-use interface.
How Pachca changed the way we communicate
More than 700 of our employees now work in Pachca. We've added automations we never had before. We used the open API to connect our conversations to the company's internal services and set up bots. Most importantly, automation is no longer the job of a single department: regular employees can build their own workflows too.
Features our old team chat app didn't have also caught on across the company. For example, cross-chat threads: you can bring a colleague into a discussion with an @mention, even if they aren't in the chat, without creating a new chat just for that. Channels, statuses and group tags stuck too. We used group tags to simplify administration, so employees land in their team's chats as soon as they first log in.