YEREVAN, MARCH 3, ARMENPRESS. The volume of deposits in Armenia continues growing, last year it increased 19%. Moreover, this year 1 trillion from the nearly 3.1 trillion AMD loans are non-resident deposits, Andranik Grigoryan – head of the department of financial stability and development at the Central Bank, told Armenpress.

“We have approximately 3.1 trillion drams in deposits, of which nearly 1trillion drams are non-resident deposits. Only in 2019 we had a nearly 19% growth in deposits which is quite a good dynamics. Even during the deep economic crisis we haven’t had decline in deposits, we also had growth, even in 2009, 2014 and during the political processes in 2018”, he said.

There was a nearly 10.7% growth in deposits in late 2018.

Commenting on the reports according to which during the 2018 Revolution days some people withdrew their deposits from banks, Girgoryan said in the beginning of 2018 when the political movements started there was a certain outflow. “But these could have been the deposits of non-residents. These deposits were not withdrawn and taken to other place, they again returned back in 3-4 months. And at that time we even had a 10% growth. This was quite a good figure and speaks about the trust towards the financial system and the banking sector”, Grigoryan said.

The CBA official said everything can have an effect on the financial stability, but it doesn’t mean that Armenia has a financial instability. “Our feature is that we had quite a good capitalized financial system, and the banks were enjoying trust among investors and clients. And this trust helped our financial system to easily overcome the year of 2018, and not only that year, in 2009 we had a nearly 23% devaluation, in 2014 nearly 15% devaluation”, he said.

Grigoryan said the financial system’s average capital adequacy ratio in Armenia is approximately 17% which is quite high. The minimum is set at 12%. The minimum level in Europe is 8%. The CBA official assures that Armenia’s financial system is quite liquid to serve every demand of clients, at the same time in case of losses it has quite a big capital to absorb potential losses.

Interview by Anna Grigoryan

Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan