State-owned Oschadbank (Kyiv) seeks to boost the share of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in its loan portfolio sixfold by 2020, to 30%, Oschadbank Board Chairman Andriy Pyshny has said.

"The development strategy of Oschadbank, which has been in the active phase of modernization in the past three years carried out jointly with our European partners, in particular the EBRD [the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development] and Frankfurt Business School, envisages that by 2020 Ukrainian business should occupy 80% of the loan portfolio. This is large corporate business, with which Oschadbank traditionally works, and this is SME, which share of the bank's loan portfolio is 5% and must reach 30% in 2020," he said at a meeting of the Regional Development Council on Tuesday in Kyiv.

The banker said that boosting SME share of the loan portfolio to 30% is an ambitious task, as Oschadbank did not work with SME before 2014.

He said that at present, there are 2 million businessmen in Ukraine that could be classified as SME. Today, 25 banks announced that their strategic direction is financing of SME, although the loan portfolio for SME is only UAH 45 billion.

"This is no more than 5% of the total loan portfolio of the banking system, and this UAH 45 billion were financed only by 10 banks," he said.

Oschadbank was founded in 1991. Its only owner is the state.

Oschadbank ranked second among 88 banks operating in the country on July 1, 2017 in terms of total assets (UAH 220.723 billion), according to the National Bank of Ukraine.