Azerbaijan, Baku, August 26 / Trend, A.Akhundov/
The policy of Azerbaijani National Bank (CBA) aimed at consolidating the banking sector will increase its stability, senior analyst of Standard & Poor's Loan Ratings Service Victor Nikolskiy told Trend on Monday.
Currently, the country's banks should have an aggregate capital no less than 10 million manat. However, new requirements to the sum of 50 million manat imposed by the CBA will come into force from January 1, 2014.
"The policies of shrinking the number of banks and procedures which are being carried out by the CBA have one aim and that is characteristic for many countries.
"However, currently the regulators use more complicated applications in the main for controlling the capital of banks; imposing the Basel III standard and clipping the minimum capital is used less often. Such a size of the minimum capital is higher than in the majority countries of the region. From our point of view, this will increase stability in the system," an S & P senior analyst said.
According to him, it is very difficult now to say whether there will be a lot of mergers or absorptions.
"Each bank has an owner which the bank serves. When two such banks attempt to merge it is practically impossible, as the owners of all the banks are different and they don't want to open their financial flows to each other for several reasons. This leads to the issue that all, even small banks, try to increase their capital to the necessary level to remain in this system, "he said.
According to him, the interest of foreign banks to these processes in Azerbaijan's bank market still remains.
"We know there are interests from Georgian, American, Turkish and Russian investors. The arrival of foreign investors is possible. Investors wait and can do something on the eve of January 1, 2014, when the banks will not have any choice. They will agree to absolutely different conditions than the ones they offer now," Nikolskiy said.
The official exchange rate on August 26 is 0.7844 AZN/USD.