Mobile bank izibank, created on the basis of TAScombank, in March-April plans to start selling domestic government bonds, as well as to start “payment by installments,” said the founder and CEO of izibank Anna Tigipko to Interfax-Ukraine agency on the sidelines of the Digital lending conference in Kiev.
“We also launch military bonds. Even before the war we started working on investment products, but we wanted to make foreign shares first. But the regulator forbade this. So we decided to focus on the domestic market and firstly work on OVGZs: military and not only military, and provide this to the client,” Tigipko said.
She said that izibank, unlike a number of other similar projects, will provide the client with an opportunity to buy government bonds in the secondary market through the exchange.
Also, in March and April for the mass izibank customers will be available the installment service, functioning in beta-version, and the service “payment in installments. Tigipko refused to disclose the partners of the project, whose goods and services can be paid for in installments, promising to do so a few months after the final agreements are made.
According to the CEO, izibank resumed issuing retail loans from about September 2022 after the restoration of the main registries, although the requirements for borrowers have become stricter and “the funnel has narrowed. She noted that today 90% of the bank’s new customers are registered through Bank ID in the Diya app, whereas even relatively recently it was only 50%.
In this regard, izibank does not plan to resume the issuance of cards through bank branches, which was suspended due to the full-scale Russian invasion, as most of the bank’s customers design and use virtual bank cards. The physical card, if desired, is sent to the client by mail, said Tigipko.
At the end of last year, the total number of izibank customers was estimated at about 300 thousand
PrivatBank by the end of this year plans to launch a new online service in Ukraine to sell government domestic loan bonds to individuals via its Privat24 platform.
“Together with the NBU, PrivatBank is developing online integration with the securities depository for the simplicity and convenience of making deals in remote channels,” the financial institution said.
According to the bank, together with the National Commission for Securities and the Stock Market, work is underway to amend a number of regulatory acts to simplify the purchase of government domestic loan bonds by individuals. In particular, this is regulation No. 735 regarding simplification of the procedure for opening an account in securities and regulation No. 1708 regarding the division of responsibilities between the bank’s branches when settling transactions with securities.
PrivatBank said that since the beginning of the year, as part of the experiment on the sale of government domestic loan bonds through VIP branches, it sold to its private customers government domestic loan bonds worth about UAH 0.5 billion, providing more than 15% of the total portfolio growth.
Since the beginning of the year, according to the NBU, the portfolio of government domestic loan bonds of individuals has grown 3.1 times, or UAH 3.05 billion, to UAH 4.52 billion. In particular, the portfolio of the hryvnia-pegged bonds increased 5.9-fold, to UAH 1.08 billion, U.S. dollar-pegged bonds – 2.7-fold, to UAH 3.23 billion and euro-pegged bonds – 2.5-fold, to the equivalent of UAH 0.21 billion.
