OREANDA-NEWS. National Rating Agency has reaffirmed its national scale ‘A+’ credit rating on Commercial Bank "OBRAZOVANIE". The outlook assigned to the rating is positive.

The positive rating outlook reflects OBRAZOVANIE owners’ commitment to developing the bank (including equity build-up through new capital injections and subordinated loans); last year’s substantial improvement of the bank’s revenue generation and financial performance; above market average growth in assets; highly diversified liabilities; generally favourable asset dynamics; adequate liquidity cushion; good quality loan book (more than 92% of loans fall into the I and II risk categories) and low proportion of renegotiated and restructured loans. We also note that last year the bank achieved its key strategic goals and registered a prospectus for issuing bonds (the offering was postponed due to the increase of the Central Bank of Russia’s key rate and resultant market rate adjustments.

Offsetting these strengths are the significant increase, in both absolute and relative terms, of OBRAZOVANIE’s problem loans (+167% year-on-year, or +RUB128.8 million), which make, however, less than 1% of total loans; and insufficient loan collaterization (the collateral to loan ratio was 97.1% as at March 1, 2015).