The reception is over

The Central Bank has completed the selection of banks for the deposit insurance system

It took the Central Bank almost a year and a half to identify the most worthy representatives of the domestic banking community and entrust them with work with private clients. As it became known yesterday from the official statement of the Bank of Russia, on December 30, all procedures for admitting banks to the deposit insurance system (DIS), which is designed to protect the population’s funds in the event of the insolvency of credit institutions, were completed. Now depositors of a bank that has passed into the CER can count on full coverage of the deposit in the amount of no more than 100 thousand rubles. However, in the coming months the amount of compensation will be increased to 190 thousand rubles, and from 2007 - to 280 thousand rubles. At the same time, according to the head of the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) Alexander Turbanov, by 2010 Russia may approach the level of EU countries, where the amount of guarantees is 20 thousand euros.

After two stages of selecting credit institutions, appealing negative opinions and court proceedings, the bottom line was 931 banks, although 1,150 applications were initially submitted. The share of deposits held in the savings account accounts for 99.3% of all deposits of the population (2.555 trillion rubles), their assets account for 94.6% (8.898 trillion rubles) of all assets of the banking system. “Fire, water and copper pipes”—that’s what bankers called the Central Bank’s checks to determine whether they meet reliability criteria for entry into the system—191 credit organizations failed to pass, and 24 of them subsequently had their licenses revoked altogether. It is noteworthy that in the summer of this year the first bank to join the SSV lost its license. Moreover, as the Central Bank has repeatedly stated, such cases may recur: if any of the banks does not meet the established requirements for three months in a row, the regulator will prohibit it from attracting funds from the public.

Selection for the deposit insurance system started at the height of the banking crisis of confidence in 2004 and immediately aroused a lot of criticism from both the bankers themselves, pointing out the bias and unprofessionalism of the Central Bank employees conducting the selection, and some financial analysts, who believed that the created DIC would not make credit organizations more transparent and reliable for the population. However, no matter how market participants feel about the insurance system - this project has become the largest in the Russian banking system over the past few years - it is unlikely that any other financial instrument will be able to boast of similar final results, even in the foreseeable future. After all, since the law on deposit insurance came into force at the beginning of 2004, the volume of private funds in banks has increased by 64% - from 1.5 trillion to 2.46 trillion rubles. Therefore, the “health” of Russian banks is a task that has long become the main one for the state, since a full-fledged banking reform has not been carried out in the country, and strengthening the role of state banks in the sector does not contribute to its development.

Finally, the banking system remains very dependent on the global market, as Yegor Gaidar, director of the Institute for the Economy in Transition, did not fail to recall yesterday. Threats to the sector, in his opinion, are the growth of lending by state banks to large state-owned companies and the deterioration of the global commodity markets. Standard & Poors rating agency analyst Ekaterina Trofimova shares a similar opinion. True, unlike Mr. Gaidar, she believes that in the short term, liquidity risks are most relevant for the banking sector. Both experts, as well as the head of the Association of Russian Banks Garegin Tosunyan, agree that Russian banks are too dependent on petrodollars. And the prescription for this disease is not issued by the Central Bank.

Natalia ROMANOVA