OREANDA-NEWS. October 23, 2009.  IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, signed an advisory services agreement with Armenia’s Ardshininvestbank to help improve the bank’s risk management practices and increase lending to smaller businesses.

The agreement is part of IFC’s broader regional crisis-response initiative focused on strengthening the banking sector to make it more sustainable.

Ardshininvestbank is among the top three banks in Armenia and has an extensive branch network.  In light of the recent financial crisis, IFC is helping the bank enhance its capacity to deal with nonperforming loans, mitigate risks, and strengthen its lending to local entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises to stimulate economic development and job creation.

“As a leading Armenian bank, Ardshininvestbank has attached great importance to risk assessment and management practices since its establishment,” said Karen Balasanyan, Deputy Chairman of Ardshininvestbank’s Management Board.  “We value very much the cooperation with IFC and are confident that our clients will notice the impact of advisory services rendered by IFC experts in the near future.”

Thomas Lubeck, IFC Regional Head of the Caucasus, said, “We are happy to help one of Armenia’s largest banks address the effects of the global financial crisis and increase the sustainability of its operations. This should create additional opportunities for economic growth in the country.”

IFC, the largest multilateral financial institution investing in the private sector in emerging markets, has launched a broad and targeted set of initiatives to help private enterprises cope with the global financial and economic crisis. These initiatives aim to coordinate responses by individual institutions, catalyze action and investment from other stakeholders, and provide targeted support through IFC’s investment and advisory services to the sectors most affected. To learn more, visit www.ifc.org/financialcrisis.

In addition to providing advisory and investment services to individual clients in Armenia, IFC also organizes seminars to train financial sector executives and managers in credit risk assessment and analysis to help ensure that portfolio risk is properly reflected on bank balance sheets.