KYIV
Banks in Ukraine reported a 40 percent year-on-year rise in net profit of 45.6 billion hryvnias ($1.7 billion) in January-August 2021, continuing the recovery process that had started earlier this year.
Total income rose by 2 percent year-on-year to 172.7 billion hryvnias, while expenses declined by 7 percent to 127.1 billion hryvnias as of September 1.
In 2020, banks in Ukraine reported a net profit of $1.5 billion, 29 percent less than in 2019, when the country’s banking sector earned $2.1 billion.
There was no increase in the number of loss-making banks. Last year, 65 in 73 solvent banks were profitable.
Still, analysts said that while the coronavirus crisis worsened the financial standing of banks, it was not as bad as they had expected in the spring of 2020.
Earlier this week, Ukraine’s parliament amended currency legislation to facilitate the performance by banks of the functions of currency supervision agents, Ukrinform reported.
The purpose of the document is to ensure full implementation of the law on currency in terms of creating, maintaining, filling banks, non-bank financial institutions, postal operators of information systems to ensure the exchange of information between them in the implementation of currency supervision.
Banking institutions are now obliged to exchange information on whether their accounts are included in the list of those opened by non-residents.
In August, Fitch Ratings revised the outlooks on five Ukrainian banks to Positive from Stable and affirmed their long-term Issuer Default Ratings (IDRs). The banks’ Viability Ratings (VRs) are unaffected by the rating action.
The affected banks are JSC CB PRIVATBANK (Privat), JSC State Savings Bank of Ukraine (Oschadbank), JSC The State Export-Import Bank of Ukraine (Ukreximbank), JSB Ukrgasbank (Ukrgas) and ProCredit Bank (Ukraine) (PCBU).
The rating actions followed Fitch’s similar action on Ukraine’s sovereign rating, reflecting the resilience of Ukraine’s credit fundamentals to the coronavirus shock and our expectation of economic recovery, Fitch said in a report.
The agency said that the long-term IDRs, Support Ratings (SRs) and Support Rating Floors (SRFs) of state-owned Privat, Oschadbank, Ukreximbank and Ukrgas reflected Fitch’s view of support these banks could receive from the sovereign if required.