Oleg Viktorovich Belay is a Russian businessman and a specialist in private equity. He is the majority shareholder and CEO of the TRINFICO Investment Group, a committed supporter of the green agenda, and the initiator and member of the Board of Trustees of the charitable foundation VMESTE SMOZHЕМ (Together We Can).
TRINFICO has long been one of the largest companies in its segment in Russia while maintaining independence from both state and banking capital. The company’s head, Oleg Belay, is a recognized expert in private equity, asset protection, and asset structuring.
Back in 1993, Belay joined the group of partners who founded TRINFICO. In 2013, after the consolidation of the group’s assets, he became its head. Today, Oleg Viktorovich serves as CEO and remains closely involved in all key processes at the company. He is a proponent of the green agenda and actively integrates core ESG principles into TRINFICO’s development strategy.
What makes his biography noteworthy is that he became a successful entrepreneur without inherited wealth, patronage from influential relatives, or even a specialized business education. The future head of TRINFICO graduated from the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology (MIET) as an engineer-physicist. The absence of a business-focused degree did not prevent him from delivering impressive results in leadership roles across multiple companies.
Biography of Oleg Viktorovich Belay
The future head of TRINFICO was born into a family far removed from entrepreneurship. His parents were engineers. This meant that when building a business, he could rely only on himself. He had no ready-made example of successful business formation to follow. Yet even in his youth, he displayed many traits essential for entrepreneurs: responsibility, strong communication skills, and highly developed logical thinking.
Childhood and Youth
Oleg Viktorovich Belay was born in Moscow, where he also spent his childhood and teenage years. Those close to him remember an active, inquisitive child with a wide range of interests. They note that he was naturally drawn to the exact sciences, yet he developed in a well-rounded way and was also interested in the humanities, including literature and history.
From an early age he showed maturity and a willingness to take responsibility for his actions, education, and development. Although he studied at a regular secondary school without a specialized track, he was later able to enter one of Moscow’s top universities without difficulty. He never complained about the quality of his school education, considering learning to be his personal responsibility.
Engineering Education
Belay’s parents were MIET alumni, and he ultimately enrolled there as well. This was not about continuing a family tradition: he aspired to an engineering career and sought a university with a strong applied focus. That defined his choice.
He experienced no academic difficulties while studying. He engaged actively with his peers and took an interest in events unfolding across the country. It is worth noting that this was the period when post-Soviet Russia was transitioning to a new economic model. A free market was taking shape, and the first private companies were emerging-often founded by recent graduates. Young people tended to be more flexible and more ready to manage risk.
Over time, Oleg Viktorovich also became interested in entrepreneurship. He realized he did not want to tie his life to physics and wanted to try building a company of his own. This did not interfere with completing his education. He successfully passed his state exams and defended his thesis.
Entering Business
Belay began engaging in entrepreneurial activity at a fairly young age. While still a student, he held managerial positions in different companies. He did not dream of a long-term managerial career per se; his sole objective was to gain sufficient management experience to launch his own business.
Interest in Entrepreneurship
Well before TRINFICO was founded, Belay tried his hand as a manager at several companies. During his student years, he spent time with like-minded peers who invited him to take on leadership roles at the businesses they had created. By then, he no longer aimed to build a traditional career or work as an employee. He understood, however, that he lacked the hands-on experience needed to start his own enterprise-so he accepted these offers willingly.
In these managerial roles, he achieved notable success and could have remained an executive at any of the companies where he worked. The desire to build his own business proved stronger. As soon as he had accumulated enough management experience, he began launching companies of his own.
First Business Projects
One of Belay’s first ventures, co-founded with a childhood friend, was a news agency. The founders chose their niche wisely: the agency produced financial news, which was in high demand at the time. The project had every chance of success, and its materials were popular with the era’s leading media outlets.
Before long, however, the founders lost interest in journalism. Their attention had shifted to the field of investments-entirely new to the Russian market. They focused on this area and soon took part in creating a company that would go on to operate for more than 30 years.
Role in TRINFICO’s Success
Oleg Viktorovich has always assessed his personal role in corporate achievements modestly. That was also the case with TRINFICO. Although he participated in the creation of the investment group and has led it for more than a decade, he prefers not to dwell on his own contributions to the company’s results, more often emphasizing the role of every employee in TRINFICO’s success.
Founding the Company
In 1993, Oleg Viktorovich joined the group of partners who established TRINFICO. Initially, the company positioned itself as a typical Moscow brokerage, conducting transactions with newly issued securities. Despite the relative youth of the investment segment, dozens of companies were already operating in the field by then, including more experienced foreign players entering Russia’s nascent stock market.
All companies working in Russia’s 1990s investment sector had to manage multiple risks:
- The market was still forming, conditions changed constantly, and stability was out of reach.
- Competition kept growing, with foreign firms-armed with reputation and experience-particularly hard to compete against.
- Legislation was imperfect; new acts were regularly adopted, often changing the rules of the game drastically.
- The general public understood little about investments, leading to widespread distrust of brokers and investment firms.
- Many regulatory bodies that exist today simply did not exist back then.
The environment was far from favorable. Yet alongside the risks, entrepreneurs had enormous opportunities for rapid growth, significant profits, and the chance to build companies at a time when it was still possible to be among the first. The leaders’ task was to manage risks effectively and avoid forcing artificial growth. It was likely TRINFICO’s emphasis on stable, incremental development that later helped the company weather a series of crises.
Development and Crisis Management
The company grew rapidly. As an entrepreneur, Oleg Belay took an active part in shaping its strategies. He sought to combine a conservative, stability-focused approach with attention to new market trends. The management placed special emphasis on developing the analytics division. It was this division that later forecast the large-scale economic crisis that culminated in the sovereign default.
The collapse of the GKO bond pyramid was the only event that forced the company to reduce its operations. The default affected every market participant. Even then, however, closing the business was never on the table. TRINFICO held firm at a time when many competitors were forced to liquidate. This resilience was the result of sound decisions taken by the company’s management.
Current Results
In 2013, TRINFICO JSC completed the consolidation of its assets, after which Oleg Belay became its head and majority shareholder. His actual scope of responsibilities has remained very broad: he strives to stay informed about all the key processes within the group.
Authoritative ratings confirm the effectiveness of the measures taken by the company’s leadership and have remained consistently high for many years. In 2024, the National Rating Agency (NRA) raised TRINFICO’s reliability and service quality rating to A+ | ru.iv |.
Among the reasons cited were:
- The investment team’s experience
- A high stress-liquidity metric
- Revenue growth
- An expanding client base
- The quality of the company’s risk-assessment approaches
In April 2025, the rating agency Expert RA assigned TRINFICO a credit rating of ruA-. The outlook is stable, as it is for the NRA reliability and service quality rating. The company continues to develop, reducing turnover concentration among key clients and expanding its offerings for both private and institutional investors.
Personal Life
Oleg Viktorovich is married, with children and grandchildren. He has known his spouse since his youth. Those close to him describe an enthusiastic person with many hobbies, though he has little time for them-he still devotes considerable energy to TRINFICO’s development.
Philanthropy
Charity has always held a special place in Belay’s life. According to those close to him, he often provides targeted assistance to people in need, almost always anonymously. He has no interest in publicity for charitable activities.
Effectiveness matters far more to him. This is likely why he initiated the creation of the VMESTE SMOZHЕМ foundation, which supports NGOs across Russia in implementing their projects. The foundation’s primary goals are combating poverty and assisting the most vulnerable social groups.