By Andrei Skvarsky.
Raiffeisenbank has bought a Russian retail business from Swedbank, a Swedish lender with a global network which is shutting its entire retail operation in Russia.
Joining the swelling ranks of foreign banks shutting their Russian retail operations, Swedbank offloaded its retail division in Kaliningrad to Raiffeisenbank and plans to sell off its remaining retail outlets in Russia – those in Moscow and St Petersburg – by the end of the year, according to Russian daily Kommersant.
The Swedish bank will ultimately reduce its presence in Russia to its Moscow head office with corporate lending as its only line of business.
Swedbank began to intensively build out retailing in Russia in 2008 but ditched the project last summer because of the global financial crisis.
The banks that have closed their Russian retail operations or are planning to include HSBC, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Santander, GE Money Bank, Svenska Handelsbanken, and Rabobank.
While Swedbank allegedly sold its Kaliningrad business at a premium, Barclays said two days ago that it expected a loss of 64m pounds ($104m) from the sale of its retail and commercial business in Russia.
Swedbank has 9.4m private and 657,000 corporate customers. It has about 320 branches in Sweden and 220 in the Baltic countries, and is also present in Copenhagen, Helsinki, Luxembourg, Marbella, New York, Oslo, Shanghai and Ukraine.
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.