UrBC, Yekaterinburg, August 27, 2010. Standard & Poor's, the international rating agency, promoted OAO Khanty-Mansiyskiy Bank’s rating outlook from Stable to Positive recently. At the same time, the contractor’s long-term B+, short-term B, and the national scale ruA+ credit ratings have remained the same.

‘The new outlook reflects our feeling that the negative impact of the economic downfall has actually done less harm to Khanty-Mansiyskiy Bank than we’d expected; moreover, the bank proved to operate rather stably in financial terms,’ says Standard & Poor's credit analyst Maria Malyukova.

Still, the bank’s ratings can’t go any further up at the moment due to the uncertainty regarding the company’s upcoming privatization. Besides, the Russian banking market situation is still far from blissful, which affects both the borrowers’ solvency and the quality of the country’s banking assets.