Cbank: Russians’ deposits with banks rise by 9.9% in 2019

MOSCOW, Jan 28 (PRIME) – Households’ deposits with Russian banks grew 9.9% on the year to 30.549 trillion rubles in 2019, the central bank said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Despite a significant fall of interest rates in 2019 (to 5.84% on the long-term ruble deposits in November from 6.91% in January), the declining inflation made the savings mechanism still popular,” the regulator said.

In December, the deposits rose 4% due to seasonal reasons, including payments of pensions for December and January.

The share of foreign currency deposits fell to 19.6% in December from 21.5% in January. It fell to below 20% for the first time since the economic crisis of 2014 thanks to ruble strengthening and decreasing interest rates on such deposits. The share of foreign currency deposits of companies fell to 30.5% from 37%, respectively.

The combined portfolio of retail loans issued by the Russian banks went up by 18.5% in 2019, while the corporate loan portfolio rose 4.3% in 2019 and remained flat in December.

The Russian banks extend the duration of unsecured consumer loans with the share of the loans for more than three years amounting to 60%, which may become a source of a credit risk in the future, the central bank also said.

The banking sector’s pre-tax profit rose 50% on the year to 2.037 trillion rubles in 2019, which is better than the regulator’s forecast of 1.9 trillion rubles. The net profit grew 70% to 1.7 trillion rubles due to a number of technical and one-time factors.

(62.3380 rubles – U.S. $1)

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