The fourth “Bank Regional Strategies” conference was held in Rostov-on-Don on 10 April. Opening the conference, the editor in chief of the Expert Yug magazine, Vladimir Kozlov, said that banks have never before played such a large role in the Russian economy as they do today. While other experts were pessimistic about the prospects of regional banks, the chairman of the Executive Board of Center-invest Bank, Yuri Bogdanov, spoke about the results achieved by the bank through applying transformational banking principles.

First and foremost, the crisis on global and national markets required more careful coordination and development of the bank’s business plan for its ecosystem. The bank’s ecosystem comprises its shareholders, employees, customers, and partners, all of whom have worked together to implement their programmes for sustainable, innovative and responsible development in terms of the following:

• space (southern Russia, Russia, global markets);
• time (the older, younger and future generations);
• society (the authorities, civil society organisations, informal groups);
• information (including electronic and print media, the Internet, “orders from above”, word of mouth).

By applying transformational banking principles Center-invest Bank achieved considerable success in 2014. We generated income of RUB10.6bn, which we distributed as follows: RUB2.7bn to our customers, RUB3.2bn to our partners, RUB2.9bn to shareholders and allocated for the bank’s future growth, and RUB1.8bn to our employees and the government. Thanks to our transparent and effective operations, the bank passed all the inspections by supervisory bodies for compliance with Russian and international standards. Taken together, these inspections lasted a total of 1663 days.

For more information on transformational banking, please see Dr Vysokov’s recent book, “Transformational Banking: made in Russia”.

As has become traditional, the conference ended with an award ceremony for southern Russia’s leading banks based on performance in 2014. Center-invest Bank received two awards: “Largest Bank by Assets” and “Most Profitable Bank in Southern Russia in 2014”.