OREANDA-NEWS. July 20, 2010. In the first half of 2010 Center-Invest Bank made 2367 loans to SMEs totalling RUB9.17bn, a 56% increase on the same period of last year. The volume of lending also exceeded the pre-crisis levels of 2007 and 2008, by 19% and 3.2%, respectively, reported the press-centre of Center-Invest Bank.

The SME loan portfolio also increased by 26.2% (RUB2.85bn) and at 01.07.2010 was RUB13.71bn.

In 2009-2010 Center-Invest Bank signed agreements with the Guarantee Funds providing loan security for SMEs in the Rostov and Volgograd regions, Krasnodar Krai and Stavropol Krai. To date, we have used these guarantees to make 47 loans worth a total of RUB175m.

Center-Invest Bank has been running programmes to support SMEs in southern Russia for twelve years now. Today, 40,000 SMEs and self-employed individuals bank with us.

In 2009, in terms of the number of loans issued to SMEs, Center-Invest was the top performing bank in the Rostov Region SME Development Programme, providing 4169 loans totalling RUB15.7bn. We account for 38.7% of the number of loans made and 27.6% of their volume.

At the national level, Center-Invest Bank is rated as one of the ten best partners for SMEs.
According to RosBusinessConsulting (www.rbc.ru), among all Russian banks we rank 5th in terms of the total value of loans, 7th in terms of the number of loans to SMEs, and 9th in terms of loan portfolio.