PRESS: Rossiysky Capital to boost mortgage lending to 50 bln rbl

MOSCOW, Aug 1 (PRIME) -- Russian bank Rossiysky Capital, a unit of the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA), plans to focus on mortgage lending and boost it to 50 billion rubles a year in the future, Kommersant business daily reported Monday citing the bank’s CEO Mikhail Kuzovlev.

“The volume of this market is comparable to the market of deposits, and we want to obtain a certain niche here. We currently focus on providing mortgage lending: we will provide 5 billion rubles (worth of mortgage loans) this year, while we did not specialize in this product earlier. In the future, we plan to boost the lending to 50 billion rubles a year,” he said.

Mikhail Beryozov, the bank’s Deputy CEO and CFO, said on July 27 that the bank recently started providing mortgage loans and issued around 170 million rubles worth of loans over the last two months, while receiving bids for a total of 2 billion rubles.

Rossiysky Capital does not plan to bail out troubled companies in the future and will not also act as an appraiser and a temporary bailout agent of troubled banks, as it was planned earlier, sources told Kommersant. The bank will soon prepare an updated strategy where it will narrow the list of its activities, a spokesperson for the bank said.

(67.0512 rubles – U.S. $1)

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