Promising infusions

VTB-24 will satisfy the needs of small businesses

The volume of loans to small businesses issued by VTB-24 Bank will amount to about $700 million, Nadezhda Karsalova, vice-president of Vneshtorgbank, said yesterday. Market participants note the rapid growth of lending to small businesses, pointing out that financial institutions so far satisfy demand only by 15-20%.

According to experts, over the past three years the volume of lending to small and medium-sized businesses has doubled both due to the emergence of new players in the market and due to the growth of the portfolios of its former participants. The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade estimates the need of small enterprises for credit resources at 25-30 billion dollars (or 0.75-1 trillion rubles). At the same time, according to the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, banks satisfied at most a fifth of enterprises’ requests.

At the end of ten months of this year, VTB-24’s portfolio of loans to small businesses amounted to about $650 million. As VTB-24 board member Sergei Suchkov previously stated, increased competition in the market for servicing large corporate clients is forcing banks to pay more attention to small companies. In particular, in the Russian small business segment, an increase in lending and raised funds is projected to reach 918 billion and 540 billion rubles. respectively. The leader here is Sberbank, which last year alone issued approximately RUB 146 billion in loans to small businesses. Approximately 60% of these loans were received by individual entrepreneurs.

Managing Director of the Department of Medium and Small Business of the Bank of Moscow Maxim Shindyapkin believes that this is a promising direction. “The demand is now unsatisfied, businessmen are very interested in financial injections,” he says. “In addition, the percentage of overdue loans in this sector is an order of magnitude lower than in the consumer lending sector, which is important for bankers.” Large banks take a balanced approach to the quality of the collateral and the borrower himself, despite the simplified procedure for considering loan applications, Mr. Shindyapkin noted. “Small” borrowers are interesting to banks for one more reason - many of them have good development prospects, and banks are ready to help their clients grow.

However, not all Russian banks are willing to develop this area. Thus, one of the largest Russian banks, Alfa Bank, has a poorly developed line of small business loans. Uralsib Bank began working in this direction only two years ago.

Nikolay KOCHELYAGIN