During the past year, the situation in the financial sector remained difficult on the background of persistent negative trends in the economy. Under these circumstances, the Bank had two major objectives: to maintain financial stability and to preserve its market positions.
I believe we have succeeded: firstly, due to the consistent support of our shareholders, who made investments into the Bank’s capital; secondly, due to our efforts aimed at increasing business efficiency and developing a crisis risk management system. The Bank’s progress in achieving its objectives has been confirmed by international and Russian rating agencies, which affirmed all ratings at the pre-crisis level.
We tried to learn as many lessons from the financial crisis as possible. In 2010, we will continue to pursue our consistent activities with the view of increasing efficiency of the Bank’s performance and developing the risk management system. At the same time, our goal for the current year is to achieve an intensive growth of business indicators. It would hardly be reasonable to expect another credit boom, which we evidenced during the pre-crisis period. However, while giving real assessment of the exogenous environment and our competitive edges, we set rather ambitious operational objectives for the current year. In particular, we intend to shift our focus from maintaining substantial liquidity reserves to boosting the volume of performing assets, which will allow to improve the Bank’s financial results in 2010.
Dealing with this complex assignment envisages activities in the whole range of areas, including the launch of upgraded retail lending programmes, pro-active search of «growth points» in the corporate sector, and expansion of financial market operations. We re-emphasise our stance on a sustainable growth of our funding base, in particular, by tapping domestic and international financial markets, and increase in the volume of customer funding.
We would also like to assure our customers that long-term cooperation and establishment of partnership relations with our clients is an indisputable priority for Bank Petrocommerce. We understand that the Bank’s success depends on the clients’ welfare and intend to strive for maintaining the status of a reliable financial partner. We can proudly state that our clients reciprocate: the trend in account balances proves their trust.
I consider all objectives of this year to be achievable. We have enough resources for this as well as our main asset — a strong team of professional and responsible people capable of bringing the Bank to the new levels of development.
Yours faithfully,
Vladimir Nikitenko
President
Bank Petrocommerce