Opinions & Interviews

MINSK, 2 July (BelTA) – Belarus is turning into a stably profitable investment destination, Sberbank President, Chairman of the Board German Gref has said in an interview with Belarus 1 TV channel, BelTA has learned.

German Gref noted that the bank found a stable and lucrative investment market in Belarus. “The operations in Belarus generated a 17% return on capital last year, which is pretty good for the banking sector, although it is lower than in Russia. I believe this year the figure will increase to 20%, which is a normal indicator for us. We can say that since the start of 2018 our operations in Belarus have been stable and crisis-free. This is a lucrative market that generates an acceptable rate of return. Therefore, everything is in place for investing new resources in Belarus, which we are going to do,” German Gref said.

He mentioned various options for expanding the bank’s operations in Belarus. One of them is transferring a technology to provide loans to SMEs using neural networks in decision support systems. “At present our experts in Russia are working on neural networks taking into consideration the data provided by the National Bank of Belarus. We hope we will be able to launch this technology in Belarus by the end of the year. Another area of cooperation is transferring client identification technology. This technology will be available in Belarus via our subsidiary bank,” he said.

Sberbank upholds many educational projects in Russia. “We have agreed that we will showcase our undertakings to the Belarusian president during his next visit. If Belarus gets interested, we are ready to launch education support programs in Belarus, like those similar to Teacher for Russia,” German Gref noted.