Sber wants to maintain the positive trend of dividend growth

The main task for the bank remains to ensure stable operation and maintain optimal capital adequacy. Another guideline is business growth, which is ensured by the availability of free capital. Taking into account the fulfillment of these two factors, a decision will be made on the payment of dividends and their amount. This was stated by Vice President, Director of the Finance Department of Sberbank Taras Skvortsov in an interview with “Kommersant“

“In December, as part of the presentation of the development strategy for the next three years, we will present a new dividend policy. If you look at the payment schedule of our dividends, you can see that in recent years the dividend per share has only grown, and we, of course, want to maintain this positive trend,” said a bank representative. Let us recall that this year Sber paid record dividends to its shareholders – 565 billion rubles.

Skvortsov also suggested that, most likely, this year the sector’s profit will be a record and will exceed the level of 2021. One of the main reasons, in his opinion, is qualitative changes – in the banking sector, there are only those players who know how to work well and manage risks correctly. “Now, even despite the growing key rate and the volatile ruble exchange rate, the banking industry is still showing consistently good results; we do not see any sharp negative jumps. This means that banks have learned from previous crises and learned how to properly manage risks. At the same time, not only the largest players are profitable, but also banks outside the top 20, which indicates the health of the sector and gives hope for further development. In my opinion, the high result of 2023 will not be one-time in nature; we see opportunities for accelerated growth of the banking industry in the future,” Skvortsov said.

Skvortsov also expressed the opinion that the Central Bank’s increase in the key rate will not have a significant impact on the bank’s interest income. “Investors should not worry: due to the balanced structure of assets and liabilities, changes in the key rate do not have a significant impact on our interest income,” he said. But, as Skvortsov noted, raising the key rate will cool demand and slow down lending growth in the traditionally high season – in the fourth quarter. As for the Central Bank’s increase in premiums on risk ratios for mortgages and unsecured consumer loans, as well as tightening macroprudential limits, according to Skvortsov, there have not been such radical changes in regulation in this area before, so it is now difficult to accurately assess their consequences. “But one thing is clear – both we and other banks will be forced to refuse loans to a large number of clients in order to meet new standards, especially for consumer lending,” he emphasized.

Skvortsov also said that over the past two years, the share of individuals in the bank’s capital structure has increased 2.5 times. “Now the bank has almost 1.8 million individual shareholders. The role of the retail investor has grown sharply and now 80% of liquidity in the derivatives market is provided to us by private players,” Skvortsov noted. Skvortsov also addressed the issue of the bank’s IT solutions in an interview. “For the last few years, we have been actively engaged in import substitution and introducing our own technological developments. The financial block is no exception,” Skvortsov said. According to him, the financial effect from the Sber Process Mining platform, which helps analyze and optimize processes, across Sber exceeded 15 billion rubles. As for Navigator, in which you can quickly create visual dashboards and online reporting, it is regularly used by more than 5 thousand bank managers. “According to experts, the Russian market for process and business analytics will actively develop, so I think our solutions will be in demand among both government and commercial companies,” Skvortsov said.