Awards for Excellence country winners – Ukraine

Giving state-owned lenders awards for commercial banking is typically something Euromoney is reluctant to do, especially in former Communist countries. But anyone who knows Ukraine knows that PrivatBank is not your average former Soviet state-owned bank.

Largely thanks to early investments in technology, PrivatBank is by far the biggest bank in Ukraine, with 18 million customers. It claims that more than half the bankable population uses PrivatBank as their main bank and it has a 36% share of retail deposits and a 38% of retail loans. Yet in stark contrast to Russia’s Sberbank, for example, PrivatBank has only been state owned since 2016.

After its nationalization, PrivatBank underwent a major overhaul in its governance, staff, risk systems, products and business model. It has received recognition from a variety of sources for the work it did in these areas before the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022.