State Sense Bank considers the main competitors for the coming year to be the state-owned Ukrgasbank, the bank with foreign capital OTP Bank and the private Ukrainian FUIB, acting head of the board of the financial institution Olena Zubchenko said.

"The first task is to compete with Ukrgas, OTP and FUIB. Let's look at the results of this year, we are setting ourselves very ambitious goals, we understand that it will be a difficult year, but I think everything will be successful," she said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

According to Zubchenko, these three banks have a model similar to Sense Bank.

"Privat and Oschad are not our competitors, because they have a slightly different model. If we talk about retail, then achieving such a number of customers in this segment is not our strategic goal. With Ukrexim, we also have different models, completely different conditions for the retail business, plus we are a more digital bank," the head of Sense Bank explained.

Speaking about the specialization of the nationalized bank, Zubchenko noted that Sense maintains an emphasis on technology and plans to strengthen it in the future. In particular, the head of the bank informed that there are a lot of developments and projects in development that will strengthen Sense Bank's position as a technological and customer-friendly bank.

"In general, we are looking towards a full-fledged ecosystem for bank clients. This could be a very promising area, which we are already deeply studying, communicating with potential partners. I think that even before the end of the first quarter we will be able to show something interesting in this direction, until mid-summer for sure," she added.

Regarding the bank's strategy within the program with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to review the strategies of all state banks, Zubchenko said that Sense is already taking certain steps in this direction. At the same time, she clarified that it would be correct if this work was supervised by the chairman of the board, Oleksiy Stupak, selected by the supervisory board based on the results of a competition, who is awaiting confirmation of the appointment by the NBU.

"For our part, we have so far prepared the main areas of activity, which are approved by the shareholder. This is such a high-level basis, and the next one will be the strategy," the acting head of the board said.