OREANDA-NEWS. November 16, 2012. Masterforex-V Academy and the Birzhevoy lider (Stock Exchange Leader) magazine for investors placed Sviaz-Bank 17th among the most popular banks in Moscow on the Internet. The rankings were based on the popularity of browsing searches for banks on the Yandex browser, reported the press-centre of Sviaz-Bank.

For example, there were 32,684 searches for Sviaz-Bank in the browser in October. The most popular and frequently visited sections of the Bank’s site are the Potrebitelskiy kredit (Consumer Credit), Ipotechniy kredit (Mortgage), and Kreditovaniye gotovogo zhilya (Ready Housing Loans, Secondary Market) pages.

“The Bank’s popularity with the public is a factor working to raise its efficiency,” said Yevgeny Olkhovsky, an expert of the Masterforex-V Academy. “This criterion is generally passed up by business media analysts who are only concerned with bank capitalization, size of a bank’s loan portfolio, its quarterly balance sheet profit, size of its authorized capital, and the like, even though each of these criteria depends in a direct way on the bank’s popularity with the public and its potential customers.”

Today, Sviaz-Bank offers a wide range of banking services for individuals – accepting funds on deposit, issuing consumer credit, loans for purchasing cars, mortgages, plastic cards, money transfers, Internet banking, and safe deposit boxes, among others. In 2012, the Bank has made significant breakthroughs in mortgages and consumer credit and has been named among the top-ten mortgage banks. Its portfolio of loans to individuals has actually doubled (increasing by 70%) since January 1, 2012. Its portfolio of loans made to private entities has increased by over 10 billion rubles to 24.5 billion rubles.

The bank runs a network of branches in 52 regions across Russia and operates 133 backup and operations offices, and mini-branches. Sviaz-Bank is a shareholder of AKIB Pochtobank CJSC, Perm.