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Russians lead on speed

Russian banks dominate the top ranks in The Banker’s first analysis of the fastest growing Europeans.
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Russian banks dominate The Banker’s first analysis of the fastest growing banks in Europe, occupying 19 of the Top 30 places in this unique pan-European assessment. Following the methodology set out below – which included data on Tier 1 capital, total assets and pre-tax profits from 645 institutions across the continent – Russian banks clearly headed the list, reflecting the massive growth in banking in the country since the financial crisis of 1998.

While five of the 19 Russian banks (Bank Petrocommerce, Nomos-Bank, Bank of Moscow, MDM Financial Group and Vnesheconombank) were in our latest Top 1000 World Banks listing, most of the top Russians are relatively small banks thereby making it relatively easy to achieve higher growth figures.

To evaluate the growth of individual banks in Europe, we examined the percentage change in Tier 1 capital, assets and pre-tax profit for the last financial reporting year (2002) from the previous year (2001), and also examined the change in the same parameters for 2001 over 2000. The object in examining these data for the past two years was to mitigate the effect of, say, a drop in profits in 2001 followed by a return to normal profit levels in 2002, which would be represented as a large percentage uplift in 2002 if we looked at 2002 alone. However, a negative percentage recorded the previous year would offset this. To further simplify the data, each parameter was assigned an index between 125 and -125, these boundaries representing growth rates of greater than or equal to 225% and less than or equal to -225%. The fastest growing banks were those with the highest positive totals.

The financial figures for 860 banks were examined and a final list of 645 emerged following the exclusion of banks that had not yet submitted 2002 figures or for which no previous year data was available. This listing follows the same principle as the Top 1000 listing in July: it deals with consolidated figures for banks or banking groups with domestic or foreign subsidiaries.

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Read more about:  Central & Eastern Europe , Russia