The head of the investment group TRINFICO, Oleg Belay, was one of the originators of asset management in Russia. By historical standards, this business is still considered relatively young in the country. It began to develop about thirty years ago. Today, TRINFICO — which was created by university students in 1993 — is a respectable asset management company with high ratings and serious institutional clients.
This company manages pension fund assets, develops customized solutions for high-net-worth individuals, provides wealth management services, and issues highly profitable mutual funds with record-breaking rates of return. But what was the state of TRINFICO three decades ago, in 1995, when it got its first asset management client?
Oleg Belay himself was 23 years old at the time. His partners were around the same age. They came into the investment business in 1992-1993 — at the inception of the Russian stock market — and made a significant contribution to its development.
Oleg Belay’s biography deserves attention for several reasons:
- It is a classic story of a self-made man who started small and achieved big results.
• It is a story of a businessman who grew up in a country where being a businessman was impossible.
• It is an inspirational tale of carving new paths where none existed before.
• It is the biography of a passionate, ambitious man who has found his true calling and kept achieving one goal after another.
Career Choices
As a child, Oleg Viktorovich Belay could hardly imagine that he would one day become a financier. He grew up during the Soviet era. In the USSR, economics universities trained specialists only for state-owned enterprises and organizations, which operated within the strict boundaries of the country’s planned economy. Such career did not seem particularly appealing to a schoolboy who grew up in a family of engineers. The boy was passionate about science, technology, and “electronic computing machine” programming (the term “computer” was not commonly used in Soviet times). He was also interested in some of the humanities, such as literature and history.
After graduation, the young man decided to study engineering. He chose the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology (MIET), which provided high-quality education with a focus on application-oriented research in the exact sciences. Belay was to become a physics engineer and work with semiconductor devices.
However, during his first year at the university, the country underwent radical changes. In 1987, as part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, the government gave private individuals the go-ahead to create cooperatives. Thus, the USSR enabled citizens to pursue their own business endeavors, albeit with significant restrictions. Belay, like many of his peers, took advantage of these opportunities and began to experiment with commercial projects. At the age of 17, he made his first money. He loved the very idea of entrepreneurship as it promised the freedom of self-fulfillment and the opportunity to bring exciting plans to life.
In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and was replaced on the global map by the Russian Federation, a state with a new-born market economy and completely undeveloped capitalist institutions.
For example, young Russia did not yet have a stock market. But Belay and his friends, fellow young entrepreneurs, were already dreaming of investing activities. They learned about them… by watching Hollywood movies on videotapes! The businessman recalls how exciting the world of Wall Street seemed to him and how much he wanted to understand the intricacies of financial transactions.
And finally, he and his friends got this opportunity.
Trading and First Steps in Asset Management
In 1992, the Russian government announced the privatization of the Soviet property, that is, the transfer of state-owned enterprises into the private sector. For this purpose, it issued privatization checks, or vouchers, most of which were soon offered for sale, as most people did not know what to do with them and preferred to simply monetize them. This was the beginning of security trading and, by extension, stock markets in Russia.
Belay and his partners were at the core of this process. In 1992, the novice financiers started to try their hand at a new business — voucher trading. Their lack of knowledge posed a certain problem (the business book market in Russia was still severely undersupplied). However, they managed to base their professional development on practice, that is, on their own trading experience, mistakes, and achievements.
In this situation, Oleg’s systems thinking and knowledge of the exact sciences came in particularly handy. In 1993, when he and his partners created TRINFICO, 21-year-old Belay took on the role of chief financial officer.
During the first two years, TRINFICO operated as a brokerage firm. The partners explored the instruments of the stock market and eventually moved on from vouchers to stocks, bonds, and derivatives. Their assets were steadily growing. And in 1995, the company reached a major milestone. The launch of asset management services took TRINFICO to a whole new level.
When talking about the history of his business, entrepreneur Oleg Belay emphasizes that it has always been evolving gradually. From the very beginning, the process of business evolution was based on analyzing market trends and the needs of society and the economy. It was this strategy that eventually brought the company to asset management. By the mid-1990s, many Russians had accumulated substantial wealth thanks to the opportunities of the free economy. Naturally, these people wished to preserve and increase their funds. This created a demand for asset management services, which were already popular in Western countries.
In 1995, the financiers got their first client who chose them to manage his assets. As a result, over the last three decades, TRINFICO has been operating as an asset management company. Although the investment group continues to offer brokerage services and conduct its own trading transactions, its core business today revolves around mutual funds and asset management in the stock market.
Building Trust with Clients
Today, the businessman holds the position of CEO at TRINFICO. He is the majority shareholder of the company to which he has dedicated most of his life. Over this time, he held various top management positions, built the company’s strategy, and determined the trajectory of its tactical maneuvers. One of the main tasks of the executive was to research and develop new markets; he regularly introduced new services and expanded the range of the company’s investment methods.
What has TRINFICO achieved by 2025?
- It manages the assets of private and institutional investors and is now one of the largest investment groups in Russia.
• It is also one of the oldest AMCs in the country, with a respectable and solid reputation.
• It maintains high reliability ratings. In 2024, TRINFICO received an ‘A+’ rating based on the assessment from the National Rating Agency. The experts noted the longevity of the business, its stability, a strong liquidity risk management framework, and a highly competent team. Speaking of which, the core members of the team are investment specialists who have been with the company for more than twenty years (some of them being there almost since its founding).
• The group is known for its advanced business approaches. It was the first in Russia to receive a “green” ESG rating, which indicated the AMC’s thoughtful attitude towards the environment and society. The score was once again confirmed last year based on all three parameters: E (Environment), S (Society), and G (Governance).
• The brand’s mutual funds are regularly listed among the top most profitable financial instruments on the Russian stock market. For example, the open-end mutual fund Capitalist reached a 47.45 percent annual return in 2024.
The key to the group’s success, according to the CEO, is responsibility to clients. TRINFICO pays great attention to risk analysis to ensure thorough asset protection. Among other things, the effectiveness of its risk management methods is evidenced by the fact that its client base includes pension funds which, due to legal reasons, are required to choose only the most stable and reliable asset management companies.
Personalized Solutions and Wealth Management
Closed-end fund structures hold a significant place among the company’s services. These solutions are popular among high-net-worth individuals who want to grow their family wealth and hand over various financial and management tasks to investment professionals.
The company’s experienced portfolio managers tailor the products to each client’s individual needs. As a result, they produce unique investment strategies and highly-personalized solutions. The TRINFICO Wealth division takes on the full range of individual wealth management tasks to achieve the goals of investors. An integrated approach allows the company to protect and increase the assets, sell them at the best market price, attract investments, and create estate planning strategies.
All these processes are treated with strict confidentiality and receive priority support from personal managers.
Financial Well-being for Everyone
Over the years, TRINFICO has been mostly focusing on serving VIP clients and institutional investors. However, the 2020s marked the spread of an important socioeconomic trend — a large portion of the population began to engage in investing. This was made possible by the global digital transformation and the advancement of online investment tools.
Responding to the needs of the market, in 2024, the company placed three highly profitable open-end mutual funds on the Finuslugi platform. As a result, financial instruments developed by leading industry experts were “brought to the masses.”
From now on, the group’s financial products will be helping even more people to improve their financial well-being. Oleg Belay plans to continue in this direction. His brand is expected to list even more mutual funds on Finuslugi in 2025.
