Page 46 - UKRRptNov19

UAH50,000 by transferring funds from one current account to another.
8.0 Financial & capital markets 8.1 Bank sector overview
Ukrainian banks are back in the black and just turned in their biggest profits in years after a lacklustre year in 2018 and a disastrous year in 2017 when the sector made heavy losses in June and December – the latter caused by the nationalisation of the then largest commercial bank in the sector, PrivatBank, that is the subject of controversy today.
The sector benefited from a comprehensive banking reform led by former National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) governor Valeriya Gontareva who largely cleaned up the sector and closed over 100 banks.
Ukrainian banks increased their net profit by 3.2 times year-on-year to UAH44.29bn in January-August, according to the NBU's report. More than half (58.3%) of this result was provided by PrivatBank.
However, the return to profitability is even more dramatic in terms of cumulative profits of the sector, which reached UAH44.3bn in the first eight months of this year, well over three times more than in the same period of 2018 and more than ten times the profit banks earned in the first eight months of 2017.
The other parameters of a bank’s health have also improved. The capital adequacy ratio (CAR) has improved from 15.3% in August 2017 to a very comfortable 18% this August.
But that is not say the sector is flourishing. Lending is stagnant and if anything shrinking slowly this year as bank managers struggle to find clients they want
46 UKRAINE Country Report November 2019 www.intellinews.com