Ukraine's banking system to recover from crisis in 2017

The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) expected that the country's banking system will recover from the ongoing crisis next year, a senior bank official said here on Thursday.

"We are pretty sure that the overall banking sector will become profitable in 2017," Vitaly Vavrischuk, the head of the financial stability department of the NBU, told reporters here.

Since the second quarter of 2016, the Ukrainian banking sector was showing signs of recovery, with banks reporting consolidated profit in May, June and August, Vavrischuk said.

The Ukrainian banking sector plunged into a severe crisis in 2014 due to the political instability and economic recession in the country, which resulted in the surge in bad loans and forced depositors to withdraw money from banks.

While in 2013 the Ukrainian banks posted a consolidated profit of about 57 million U.S. dollars, they reported a loss of about 2. 1 billion dollars in 2014.

Last year, the combined loss of the Ukrainian financial institutions reached 3.01 billion dollars.

（APD）