April 15, 2013. Expert Rating Agency’s analysts came up with the rating of Russia’s largest banks in terms of the loan book on sole traders in 2012. The rating featured 30 banks, with average loan book growth at 40% a year, SKB-Bank’s press service reports.

Nevertheless, the banks that have proved very successful with lending to sole traders, enjoyed a much faster portfolio growth. As for SKB-Bank, their sole traders loan book rose by 71.7% last year and came to 15.17bn RUR, which secured the bank the 4th position in the national rating: it was only outstripped by Sberbank, Rosselkhozbank, and VTB-24.

SKB-Bank sees SME lending as one of its strategic priorities and thus pays enormous attention to microfinancing small-turnover businesses. These are moderately-sized retail outlets and service sector businesses, including the so-called mom and pop shops – in a word, these are all small enterprises. About 5,000 to 6,000 loan applications get submitted with the bank every month.