OREANDA-NEWS. October 28, 2014. The Lithuanian branch of Nordea, the largest financial services group in the Nordic and Baltic region, reported LTL 53 million unaudited profit after loan losses. In the same period last year this number was LTL 60.4 million. Year on year, profit before loan losses rose 35.5% to LTL 72.6 million.

The total deposit portfolio increased 34.2% year on year at the end of the third quarter and stood at LTL 4 billion. The private customer deposit portfolio grew 15.2% while the third quarter corporate customer deposit portfolio picked up 40%.
 
"The global economy weighed on both private and corporate customers who were saving up even more in the third quarter. The rise in the deposit portfolio and checking accounts is also indicative of the preparations corporate and private customers are making for euro introduction. Similar tendencies were reported in Latvia and Estonia as both countries prepared for euro adoption and all the funds in the accounts and deposits were converted free of charge on the day of the switch to the euro currency,” according to Inga Skisaker, the Head of Banking Baltic Countries at Nordea.
 
At the end of September, the bank’s loan portfolio contracted 1.5% to LTL 7.9 billion compared to the same period last year. The private loan portfolio remained barely unchanged with a decrease of 0.3% and accounted for LTL 2.9 billion, of which LTL 2.4 billion were housing loans. Compared to the same period last year, housing loans increased 0.7% over nine months.
At the end of the third quarter, the Nordea corporate customer loan portfolio shrank by 2.2% to LTL 5 billion, year on year.
 
Inga Skisaker, the Head of Banking Baltic Countries at Nordea, notes that trends in client behaviour have remained rather stable lately as clients increasingly favoured online services to handle their finances. The activity of online and mobile banking clients has been showing a steady rise each quarter of the year.
 
The Nordea smartphone app was downloaded by 40% more customers than in the respective period a year earlier. The number of mobile banking users has doubled, as have the instances of mobile banking access. The share of active customers who use online banking rose 8.5%.