Page 44 - UKRRptOct21

8.0 Financial & capital markets 8.1 Bank sector overview
Ukraine’s banks have emerged from the 2020 coronacrisis healthy and in profit thanks to the clean up of the banking sector in recent years and the recovery of the economy, according to the latest results reported by the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU).
Ukraine’s banks earned UAH5,827mn ($219mn) of profits in August after they made no money at all a year ago in the same month. However, that result was still down on the UAH7,567mn they made in 2019, the last year of strong growth, but well ahead of the results in the two years prior to that when Ukraine was still recovering from the 2014 collapse.
In cumulative terms banks earned UAH45.6bn ($1.7bn) in the first eight months of this year a bit less than double the result from 2020 and even slightly ahead of the 2019 result in cumulative terms. Banking profits this year have been on a par with the 2019 benchmark year, and slightly ahead each month in the second quarter of this year on a year-on-year basis.
The health of the sector was underscored by the NBU’s 2021 sustainability stress testing of banks that found the banking industry has become more resilient to external shocks, reports the Kyiv Post. Stress testing uses computer-simulated models to analyse how banks cope with modelled economic shocks. The NBU skipped stress tests in 2020 due to the pandemic.
44 UKRAINE Country Report October 2021 www.intellinews.com