MOSCOW, June 23./ITAR-TASS/. The Russian Central Bank (CBR) has revoked one Moscow and one North Caucasus bank of their banking licenses in a continued effort to restructure the country’s financial system and ensure its stable development.

The regulator said in a statement on Monday it had revoked banking licenses from the Moscow-based Zamoskvoretsky Bank and Digbank from Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia, for their highly risky credit policies and non-compliance with federal laws on banking operations.

As of June 1, 2014, Zamoskvoretsky Bank held the 438th place in the Russian banking system and Digbank ranked 500th.

 

Improving Russian banking system

Overall, the Russian monetary and financial regulator has revoked licenses from 39 banks since the start of the year to cut their number to less than 900.

Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier said in response to a journalists’ question that license revocations were intended to improve the country’s financial system and free it from financial institutions that could not fulfill their obligations to depositors and work efficiently and posed a risk to the entire banking system.

CBR head Elvira Nabiullina said that the effort to clean the banking sector of inefficient operators is not a temporary campaign and will continue, and that the country’s top bank does not have a blacklist of banking institutions.

“Over the past year, about 50 banks have quit the market. These were either banks of unsatisfactory financial standing or banks strongly involved in criminal money market servicing,” Nabiullina said.

The process when inefficient operators quit the market makes the banking system healthy and raises people’s confidence in the country’s financial system, she added.