Awards for Excellence 2020
Few banks have undergone as great a transformation over the last four years as PrivatBank. In December 2016, when it was taken over by the state, Ukraine’s biggest bank held more than a third of the country’s retail deposits and boasted 20 million customers.
The bank’s loan book, however, consisted almost entirely of credits to companies linked to its former owners, Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov, all of which defaulted after the forced nationalization.
The first challenge for the new shareholders was to ensure the stability of the bank. As well as its huge deposit base, PrivatBank was the Ukrainian market leader in credit cards and processed three quarters of the country’s payments thanks to its technological sophistication.
In 2017, an interim management team succeeded in preventing a run on deposits and keeping the bank’s systems running, despite the departure of more than 600 of the bank’s IT staff. Work was also started on developing a new strategy for the bank.