OREANDA-NEWS. September 24, 2008. There was a festive ceremony in Moscow in which the winner of the annual rating of the level of service in the retail banks was announced, reported the press-centre of Raiffeisenbank.

It was organized by the magazine The Retail Finance together with the company SAS Russia/CIS. ZAO Raiffeisenbank was the winner of the rating. Roman Vorobiev, Member of the Board, Head of Consumer Banking Directorate, received the prize on behalf of Raiffeisenbank.

When assessing the level of customer service the following factors were considered: the banking office and the service that it provides, the production line, the subjective opinion about the bank from its customers, the information center, the web-site, the internet banking features and the level of communication of the bank with its clients.

"This award is a confirmation of the success of our strategy to provide the highest level of service to our customers. This is particularly important now, as the legal merging of Raiffeisenbank and Impexbank has occurred. We are grateful to our customers for the trust that they have put into the bank, and to our staff, who enable such a high level of service to be offered at Raiffeisenbank", noted Roman Vorobiev.

The rating was created to assess the situation in retail banking services on the Russian market, to reveal the factors involved in successful business and the reasons behind problems which occur. It also ascertains the leaders in the market, to whose level of service others can and need to strive towards, and also it points out to banks in the current ’bottleneck’ how to organize their work with private customers.

In order to create the rating, initially the 50 largest retail banks in the Russian Federation were taken based on financial figures. Further collection of information required to ascertain the leading banks in terms of the level of customer service was subject to an original methodology which was devised by the magazine The Retail Finance together with the company SAS Russia/CIS.