By Leos Rousek
PRAGUE--Slovakia's central bank Tuesday said that five local
lenders, including units of Belgium KBC NV Group (KBC.BT), Italy's
Intesa Sanpaolo (ISP.MI), Austria's Raiffeisenbank Bank
International (RBI.VI) and Erste Group Bank (EBS.VI) are key for
the country's financial market and set individual capital buffers
for them against potential risks.
Owing to solid local deposits, banks in Slovakia, a country of
five million people, have been well capitalized and unscathed by
the recent credit scares that hurt other lenders, including some
parents of Slovak banks, elsewhere in the eurozone.
The central bank said it designated Ceskoslovenska Obchodna
Banka, Vseobecna Uverova Banka, Slovenska Sporitelna, Tatra Banka
and Postova Banka as locally systemic-important institutions, a
banking term used for lenders that are big and whose potential
collapse could undermine the country's entire financial sector.
Postova Bank, the country's fifth largest lender in client and
deposit terms, is controlled by the Slovak-Czech private equity
J&T Group Finance.
The central bank set an extra capital buffer, known in the
European Union as O-SII, at 1.5% for Tatra Banka and 2% for all the
other lenders.
Slovak banks emerged from the eurozone credit crisis without
needing any state aid.
The banks will be allowed to beef up their capital reserves
gradually as of Jan. 1 next year, the central bank said.
Write to Leos Rousek at leos.rousek@wsj.com, @LeoRousek