OAO Alfa-Bank was unable to retain all of Bank Severnaya Kazna’s customers, about 40% of whom refused to switch to the Moscow-based bank, Alfa-Bank’s Chief Operating Officer Valeriy Novikov announced in the course of an online conference held by the two banks.

‘Nevertheless, the remaining 60% of customers from various service segments actually became Alfa-Bank’s new clients,’ he added.

Alfa-Bank’s management reports transferring business customers from Bank Severnaya Kazna to Alfa-Bank is more difficult than transferring private customers.

‘The business customer migration process is much more complicated: because of the recession, a lot of businesses have closed down their accounts and many of them are now in the debtor category, so their accounts have to be arrested. What is more, Bank Severnaya Kazna turned out to have a lot of inactive customer accounts, so there was no point in transferring those to Alfa-Bank,’ Novikov explained.