Several Ukrainian banks, 2 associations sign memorandum to tighten financial monitoring
MOSCOW. Dec 11 (Interfax) - Ukraine's PrivatBank, Oschadbank, Universal Bank (mono) and Raiffeisen Bank, which accounted for 64.5% of the population's funds held in bank accounts and for 87.5% of all active payment cards as of October 1, 2024, as well as the National Associations of Bank of Ukraine and the Association of Ukrainian Banks signed a memorandum at a meeting at the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) on Tuesday, pledging to ensure the transparency of the functioning of the bank payment services market.
The document aims to streamline market practices and approaches to conducting customer due diligence and to monitoring their financial operations, also setting a monthly limit of UAH 50,000 from February 1, 2025 for operations of high-risk clients without verified income, Ukrainian media said.
A monthly limit of UAH 150,000 will be set for medium-risk and low-risk customers from February 1 2025, to be lowered to UAH 100,000 a month from June 1.
The new measure applies not only to P2P transactions, i.e. card-to-card transfers, which the NBU has already limited to UAH 150,000 a month in one bank, but to all transfers from current accounts to individuals, including transfers via IBAN.
The signatories said that if a customer has large savings or additionally verified income, limits will be set on a case-by-case basis depending on the level of income information on which will be gathered automatically from available sources.
Furthermore, the memorandum spells out approaches to exchanging bank information, increases control over the activities of individual entrepreneurs, limits the number of accounts customers without verified income are allowed to open to three in one currency, and strengthens control over nighttime payments.
The signatories' other requests include creating a centralized register of dubious clients, or drops, jointly with the NBU and providing the participants with access to official information on customers' income, court cases and so on via the Dia online service.
NBU Governor Andrei Pyshny said at the signing ceremony that other banks and non-bank players on the payment services market would hopefully join this memorandum. Association of Ukrainian Banks head Andrei Dubas, for his part, believes that the overwhelming majority of banks, probably even all 61 banks operating in Ukraine, will sign it.
National Association of Banks of Ukraine head Vladimir Mudry, in turn, said that this agreement does not affect competition on the market, as each bank will continue to set its own tariffs, but the memorandum provides a unified barrier to payment system abuses.
"We expect that nine clients out of ten will not feel any changes," the PrivatBank board member in charge of corporate business and small and medium-sized enterprises, Yevgeny Zaigrayev, said at the signing ceremony.
Only 1% of banks' clients have high risk status, Dubas said.
According to Pyshny, if the memorandum proves to be successful, it may replace the NBU's corresponding regulation, which expires on April 1, 2025. At the same time, he denied claims that banks could face problems if they refuse to sign the memorandum.
The signatories listed increasing state budget revenues among the memorandum's main goals.
This memorandum will stay in effect during the period of martial law or until the dubious clients register is introduced, Mudry said. The NBU believes that this register may enter into force in the second quarter of 2026.
As reported, on October 1, 2024 the NBU set a limit of UAH 150,000 per month for card-to-card (P2P, person-to-person) transfers by individuals, though it had eyed an even stricter limit of UAH 100,000 prior to that.
"The limit applies only to outgoing transfers across all accounts of a client opened in the same banks to accounts of other individuals. The limit does not apply to the accounts of volunteers who meet the criteria set forth in the resolution and persons whose monthly income from verified sources exceeds the amount of the limit," the NBU said in a press release at the time.
It does not apply to transfers of funds between a client's own accounts opened in the same bank and to transfers of legal entities, the NBU said. Transactions using IBAN details are not limited either, it said.
According to the NBU, monthly transfers of 98% of bank customers do not exceed this amount.
This limit will help minimize the use of payment infrastructure for unlawful activities, including through drop accounts, which are a common mechanism for the shadow economy, it said.
A financial market source told Ukrainian media that in the first month of the limit's functioning the volume of P2P operations dropped by UAH 5.2 billion, though IBAN transfers rose to UAH 4 billion.
