npsb.hotbox.ru was the website of Nizhegorodpromstroybank, hosted on the free Hotbox.ru hosting service; it described the bank's services for corporate and private clients, loans and promissory notes[1]. In the nn.ru directory the site was listed under the "/rub/" section[1]. The bank's head office was located at 21 Gruzinskaya Street, Nizhny Novgorod, with phone numbers under the 8312 area code[1].
What the site offered
The home page presented the bank as the holder of Bank of Russia general license No. 1851, dated 27.08.1993, and cited financial indicators as of 01.01.2002: paid-in charter capital of 230 million rubles, capital of 892 million rubles, and net assets of 3,826 million rubles[1]. As the home page stated, the bank "serves the largest enterprises and organizations that define the economic profile of Nizhny Novgorod and its region" — the client list named GAZ, the Krasnoye Sormovo plant, the Sokol Nizhny Novgorod Aircraft-Building Plant, the Nizhny Novgorod Machine-Building Plant, the Zavolzhye Motor Plant, the Teploobmennik plant, the Arzamas machine-building and instrument-making plants, Kommash, Nizhegorodsvyazinform, Nizhegorodnefteprodukt, the Russian Federal Nuclear Center (VNIIEF), NORSI-Oil, Lukoil-NN, the metallurgical plants of Kulebaki, Nizhny Novgorod and Vyksa, and the Nizhny Novgorod Fat-and-Oil Combine[1]. Listed services included settlement and cash services, lending in rubles and foreign currency, foreign-currency settlements via the S.W.I.F.T. system, currency exchange, promissory-note transactions, issuance of Union Card cards, acceptance of deposits and utility payments, and cash collection[1]. The site invited visitors to ask a question to a bank employee via the ICQ internet pager on business days from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Moscow time, if the bank's number showed Online status[1]. Contact details on the page: phone numbers (8312) 33-95-44, 33-53-49, 33-60-73, 33-18-32, 33-47-64, fax 33-37-47 and 33-43-11, listed by department — securities, bank product promotion, dealing operations, and bank management[1].
The bank in numbers
According to the 2002 text, Nizhegorodpromstroybank called itself "the largest bank in Nizhny Novgorod Region," ranked "among the hundred largest banks in Russia" and among "the most client-oriented banks in Russia," serving about 20,000 corporate and more than 189,000 private clients[1]. The bank stated that it had issued more than 130,000 "Union Card" cards and about 2,000 "Avtochip" cards, ranking among the top three Russian issuers of that processing system[1]. At that time the bank's network consisted of 26 branches, 1 additional office, 18 operating cash desks outside the main cash unit, 43 currency exchange points, and 183 cash-withdrawal points for bank cards[1]. For its performance in 1998, 1999, and 2000, the bank was three times awarded the traveling standard (banner) of the Governor of Nizhny Novgorod Region[1].
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
The site was listed in the nn.ru directory as a section devoted to Nizhegorodpromstroybank's services for corporate and private clients, including loans and promissory notes[1]. No data on the site's participation in the counter.nn.ru rating or in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote has been found in the surviving samples — this does not mean the counter recorded no hits, only that the site's trace in these particular sources has not reached us. Like many corporate pages of that period of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, the bank's site existed as an institutional calling card rather than as an independent media project.
How the site closed
The first surviving web-archive snapshot is dated August 3, 2002, and the last, December 17, 2005[2]. By December 2005 the substantive content of the bank's page had disappeared: the surviving snapshot contains only a fragment of a registration form and a list of the service's mail domains — "@pochta.ru", "@fromru.com", "@front.ru", "@hotbox.ru", "@land.ru", "@mail15.com", "@mail333.com", "@pisem.net", "@pochtamt.ru", "@rbcmail.ru"[2]. This set of domains matches the list of the Pochta.ru mail service, to which, according to the web archive, the address npsb.hotbox.ru was subsequently redirected; the domain npsb.hotbox.ru itself no longer existed at the time this entry was compiled.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)