Monday, June 7 2010 23:53

ArmInfo. The interest rates for USD loans in Armenia are declining quite intensively, Deputy Director General, member of the VTB Bank (Armenia) Directorate, Mher Grigoryan, said at today's press conference. He said that over Q1 2010 the interest rates for foreign exchange corporate loans declined by 4%. "This is conditioned by the market demand dictating lower rates for currency loans",- said Grigoryan. He added that at present the bank offers currency corporate loans at 10% p.a. (against the former 14% p.a.), and the reduced rate has considerably increased the demand for these loans. At the same time, the margin is in compliance with the standard.

He pointed out that the reduction in rates for currency loans leads to reduction in rates for currency deposits.

"Recently, we put our foreign exchange deposit rates even lower and we pay generously on our AMD deposits. And this policy is giving results: the growing amount of physical entity deposits is our most positive index," Grigoryan said.

He said that at VTB Bank (Armenia) the share of AMD deposits is 6% bigger than that of USD deposits.

"We believe that this is a quite normal margin for this market. In the near future we may consider reducing the rates of AMD deposits and, symmetrically, the rates of loans," Grigoryan said.

In Q1 2010 the share of the funds of legal entities in the structure of the obligations of VTB Bank (Armenia) grew by 21.9% to 37.1bln AMD (20.7bln AMD in call deposits), the share of the funds of physical entities - by 13.2% to 26bln AMD.