SKB-Bank was able to raise the amount of investments by natural persons by nearly 1 billion RUR in just one month, the bank’s press officer reports. The bank’s Deposit Director Denis Belogurov believes this has to do with the traditional increase in income Russian citizens usually experience at the end of the year: ‘Many companies give their employees end-of-year bonuses, some people get dividends and other types of seasonal income. Quite often, they don’t get to spend everything because of the holidays, so people choose to deposit this money with a bank.’

'Besides, banks tend to raise the interest rates on deposit schemes offered to natural persons. The rates have already gone up by 1% to 1.5% on average. I believe this is just a seasonal trend and rates will drop again in the first half of 2008,’ he adds.

'In addition, we get more natural person deposits thanks to our fast-growing network of cardholders (the bank has already issued more than 400,000 bank cards),’ Mr. Belogurov notes.