BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 10
By Jeila Aliyeva - Trend:
Austrian Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) is confident that the constant exchange in the project on conducting an External Compliance Evaluation with Azerbaijani banks will help to further strengthen and enhance the mutually beneficial cooperation, RBI told Trend.
In particular, RBI said that following the recent trends on the financial markets and the increasing importance of the AML (anti-money laundering) topic, RBI is in constant exchange with the Central Bank of Azerbaijan as a regulator and with Azerbaijani banks to engage in the project on conducting an External Compliance Evaluation in order to ensure the highest market standards and safety for both clients and partners.
“We are confident that this will help to further strengthen and enhance the mutually beneficial cooperation between RBI and Azerbaijani banks,” said the Austrian bank.
In terms of overall cooperation with Azerbaijan, the bank noted that RBI has for many years been a partner for many banks in Azerbaijan providing them with a wide range of transactional services, support in trade finance, and capital market transactions.
As earlier RBI told Trend, the bank is planning to further tighten its bilateral relationship with Azerbaijan.
"In general, it is our aim to further assist emerging markets based in the CIS region to grow fast and sustainably. Certainly, we are looking forward to further increase both the quality and quantity of the services we provide for our Azerbaijani partners. Apart from delivering traditional and cutting-edge financial solutions, we are planning to further tighten bilateral relations by boosting the number of bilateral meetings between us and our customers. Currently, we pay a visit to Baku every year to have on-sight meetings with Azerbaijani banks, and we are looking forward to further enhance such exchanges in the future. We also welcome our valuable business partners in Vienna every year in January upon their visit to the annual Euromoney conference," said the bank.
Raiffeisen Bank said it sees the growing importance of banking regulation and especially compliance topics.
"Regulatory measures need to be further improved also in Azerbaijan to stay on the world level. The implementation of international requirements considering local specifics makes this task for the Azerbaijani government and Central Bank so challenging. The regulations should be designed in a way that the market players should feel secure and at the same time comfortable to make use of a diverse set of financial products and services both locally and globally," said the bank.
Raiffeisen Bank International AG (RBI) regards Austria, where it is a leading corporate and investment bank, as well as Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as its home market. 13 markets of the region are covered by subsidiary banks. Additionally, the group comprises numerous other financial service providers, for instance in the fields of leasing, asset management, as well as M&A. To support its business activities, RBI operates representative offices and service branches at selected Asian and Western European locations.
Around 47,000 employees service 16.4 million customers through more than 2,100 business outlets, the by far largest part thereof in CEE. RBI's shares have been listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange since 2005.
RBI is Austria's second-largest bank with a balance sheet total of € 148.6 billion (as per 30 June 2019). The Austrian Regional Raiffeisen Banks hold approximately 58.8 percent of the shares, the remainder of around 41.2 percent is free-float.
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