December 23, 2013. RBC.Rating came up with a rating of non-Moscow Russian banks as of October 1, 2013. VUZ-Bank was given a rather good 72nd position in the rating. The volume of banks’ net assets was the primary criterion for assessment, the bank reports.

The final list comprised 402 lending institutions registered outside Moscow. The banks with HQ in Saint Petersburg were not excluded from the rating. The total net assets of all the non-Moscow banks stood at nearly 5.8 trillion RUR as of October 1, 2013. The federal constituencies with the largest number of banks and greatest net asset volumes were Saint Petersburg, Tatarstan, Tyumen Region (15 banks with net asset volume of over 512bn RUR), Sverdlovsk Region (16 banks with total net asset volume over 468bn RUR), and Novosibirsk Region. As for the other federal constituencies of Ural Federal District, Chelyabinsk Region (8 banks with total net assets of over 119bn RUR) was also among the top ten.

RBC reports that the expert community is currently divided into two parties, one supporting the consolidation of banks and the other denouncing this idea. The former insist that a larger bank has more risk diversification options, that it is more reliable and better protected. The latter say that small and medium non-Moscow banks have less red tape to handle and therefore they are better and faster at providing private individuals with access to funds. As a matter of fact, there are quite a few large national banks that are in no hurry to enter certain provincial constituencies as they don’t think it would be economically expedient.