Raiffeisen Bank to up medium business loans faster than market in 2014
MOSCOW. Jan 20 (Interfax) - Raiffeisen Bank expects the market for medium-sized business loans to grow 15%-17% in 2014, but intends itself to outperform the market in this segment, the bank's Head of Corporate Banking and Corporate Finance Directorate Oksana Panchenko, said in an interview with Interfax.
"We are planning for fairly significant growth in 2014. We want to surpass the market. Overall, we estimate that the market for the medium-sized business sector will grow by 15%-17% in 2014," she said.
Raiffeisen Bank classifies businesses with between 320 million rubles and 3 billion rubles and revenue as medium-sized businesses.
Panchenko said that the bank is attracted to the medium-sized business sector for a number of reasons: an acceptable level of risk, as well as revenue that is higher than from its large clients.
She said that the bank is working on speeding up the applications process for medium-sized business to receive loans to less than 20 days from nearly a month at present.
"As concerns overall corporate lending in 2014, we expect market growth to possibly be lower than the 2013 level against the background of a smaller growth in GDP. It is possible that we will not reach the market's level of growth in 2014, but we are planning to show growth nonetheless," Panchenko said.