OREANDA-NEWS. On 06 March 2009 Credit-Rating announced that it assigned bank deposit ratings to 73 Ukraine-based banks, which are currently the agency's customers. Unlike banks counterparty ratings, which exhibit bank's long-term financial strength, the bank deposit rating mirrors bank's capacity to timely and in full make payments on existing deposits in the next 12 months. The bank deposit rating is assigned pursuant to specially designed rating scale and indicates deposit's strength relatively to deposits in other Ukrainian banks.

The highest rating 5 (the highest deposits strength) has been assigned to 7 banks, with the rating 4 carried by 6 banks. The biggest number of the institutions (49 banks) has been graded '3' (medium strength), 7 banks got 2 (below medium strength) and 4 banks have been assigned '1 (low strength). Credit-Rating has published the list of banks, which were graded the highest level of 5, namely: Bank of Cyprus, Marine Transport Bank, Piraeus Bank, Swedbank, SEB Bank, Universal Bank, and Erste Bank. Other ratings will be published upon receipt of permission for publication from the banks.

Credit-Rating will further maintain all of the ratings published using information furnished by the banks. Current bank's deposit ratings will be uploaded to the agency's web-site. In the course of the rating analysis and monitoring Credit-Rating examines bank's current liquidity, structure and concentration of resources, concentration and quality of assets, balance of assets and liabilities by their due terms, bank's vulnerability to adverse commercial, financial and economic conditions, and access to external funding and level of dependency upon such sources.

Credit-Rating has developed a new type of rating in order to protect banks depositors via their informing with regard to strength of the banking institutions. Credit-Ratings CEO Mr. Stanislav Dubko believes that bank deposit ratings may help potential depositors select the most reliable banks and the depositors, whose deposit agreements will soon expire, decide on prolongation of the agreements. Credit-Rating has also subscribes to the opinion that bank deposit ratings may contribute to halting outflow of deposits from strong institutions, overcoming panic and to raising confidence to the banking system.