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MOSCOW, December 30 The Central Bank has not revoked banks’ licenses for more than 16 months; throughout the current year, the regulator has never resorted to extreme supervisory measures — this happened for the first time in the history of modern Russia, I was convinced by analyzing statistical data. The expert believes that 2024 will be different — several small players may still leave the market.
The last time a license was revoked in Russia was in the summer of 2022; on August 12, Moscow Krosna Bank lost it. The Bank of Russia considers such a long pause in the forced closure of credit institutions as evidence that the country’s banking system is stable and hopes that next year not a single player will lose a license.
But in previous years the regulator was not so lenient. Since Elvira Nabiullina came to the post of head of the Central Bank in 2013, the banking sector began to actively cleanse itself of the weak and unscrupulous. The process of “recovery” began to slow down in 2019. In 2022, after the introduction of large-scale sanctions against Russia, only two banks were forced to leave the market.
The stability of the sector, demonstrated in 2023, is based both on the internal margin of safety and fairly favorable business conditions in 2023 — a period of active recovery of the Russian economy, and on measures of support and loyalty from the Central Bank, said the deputy general director for rating activities of the Expert RA agency «Alexander Saraev.
In his opinion, next year will not be similar to this one, since banks will operate in a much more aggressive environment of high rates, which will significantly reduce the volume of profits due to a decrease in lending volumes.
In addition, according to Saraev, against the background of the growing debt burden of the population and the debt burden of corporate borrowers, the quality of banks' loan portfolios is expected to deteriorate, which will require the formation of additional reserves. As a result, for individual banks that adhere to an insufficiently conservative business model, this may create risks of significant losses and reduction of capital adequacy ratios below established minimums, he added.
«In general, the banking sector has a large margin of safety and extensive experience in overcoming crisis periods, so there will be no mass revocation of licenses; most likely, next year up to 10-15 banks, which account for less than 1% of banking assets, may leave the market sector,» the expert believes.