The priority for development of VTB Bank (Armenia) for coming years is retail business development as well as small and medium enterprise lending, stated General Director, Chairman of Directorate of the bank Yuri Gusev stated at a press conference today.

"The credit portfolio of SME in our bank makes about AMD50bln which makes 30% of our overall credit portfolio and 50% of the legal entities portfolio. We are going to grow the share. Historically, we were more focused on major business but now we will pay more attention to small companies which we think is a right area both for the bank and Armenian economy", said Yuri Gusev.

He said that in 2012, the Bank completed the reformatting all the Yerevan branches (over 20) and will finish reformatting all the 67 branches across Armenia till late 2013. Yuri Gusev also stated the preparations of the new program for agro-lending which starts in the second mid of 2013.

"In 2012, we considerably increased the share of retail lending up to 13.6%, individual lending and SME lending grew by 33% and 44.5% respectively. The deposits in the bank increased by 54%. Our strategic goal for the coming 2 years is 20% share of the retail lending market which implies our absolute leadership in this market segment", said Yuri Gusev.

Upon Mediamax's request, commenting on the bank's revealing criminal deals with the involvement of companies cooperating with the Bank within retail lending , Yuri Gusev said that lending in trade points is the main source of banking frauds but it's an unavoidable risk and the bank was ready for it. "The most important thing is to unveil shadow scales at maximum fast rates. Currently, our risk management system in terms of retail sales allows to maximum efficiently unveil the schemes. As of now, the flow of people who want to use the fraud schemes is stopped", said the VTB Bank (Armenia) General Director.

In his turn, Head of VTB Retail International at VTB24 Vsevolod Smakov noted that the banking risk control system in VTB Bank (Armenia) is one of the most perfect ones in the country. "We strive to define the profile of our target customer within the risk management and prevent the situations when people get loans not fully realizing their obligations", said Vsevolod Smakov.

He noted that Armenia is still one of the key markets of developing individual and SME lending outside the Russian Federation for the VTB Group.