Current Trends in Loans & Deposits in March

By Natalia Kochiashvili

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

The central bank released information on current trends in loans and deposits of resident commercial banks as of March 2022. According to them, the volume of loans issued by commercial banks in March 2022 increased by GEL67.52 million, or 0.16% compared to the previous month, and amounted to GEL43.32 billion as of April 1 of this year.

According to the Central Bank, in the same period, the volume of loans in national currency increased by GEL281.95 million (1.34%) while the volume of loans in foreign currency decreased by GEL214.43 million (0.975).

At the end of March 2022, commercial banks issued loans of GEL6.58 billion in national currency to resident legal entities, which is 0.24% more than in the previous month, and GEL13.7 billion in foreign currency, which is 0.81% less than in the previous month.

According to their report, during March 2022, the volume of lending to the resident household sector increased by 0.8% and amounted to GEL22.16 billion by April 1 of this year.

The 'larization' ratio of total loans stood at 49.36%, up 0.57 percentage points from March 1, 2022.

The volume of non-bank deposits in the banking sector amounted to GEL37.1 billion as of April 1, 2022, which is 1.41% less than on March 1. According to the report, in March, compared to the previous month, there was a decrease in time deposits by 6.24%, while demand deposits increased by 2.3%. The 'larization' rate of deposits for April 1 this year was 40.6%, a decrease of 0.14 percentage points in the last month.

In March, the weighted average annual market interest rate on time deposits was 6.99%, including 11% on deposits in national currency and 0.81% on deposits in foreign currency.

According to the National Bank, the share of the US dollar in foreign currency deposits was 82.65%, while the share of the euro was 15.97%.