The company has won the tender to purchase the bank and has already submitted the required documents to the National Bank of Ukraine for approval of the transaction. This is stated in an official response from the regulator to a request by Forbes Ukraine.
On December 31, the Deposit Guarantee Fund reported the establishment of a bridge bank based on RWS Bank. This mechanism is used as part of the procedure for selling insolvent banks. Until the tender winner receives approval from the National Bank to acquire a qualifying stake, the bridge bank remains under the ownership of the Deposit Guarantee Fund.
The National Bank confirmed that it has received a package of documents from Iute Group AS for approval of the acquisition of a qualifying stake in the bank. These documents are currently under review by the relevant department of the regulator. The NBU also noted that it had previously conducted a preliminary assessment of this investor as part of the admission procedure for participation in the tender to purchase RWS Bank. Following the pre-qualification review, the regulator identified no circumstances that could prevent the Estonian company from participating in the transaction.
If the application is ultimately approved, Iute Group AS will become the owner of a fully licensed bank in Ukraine. This would mark the first entry of a foreign investor into Ukraine’s banking market since 2021, when Czech businessmen Tomas Fiala and Ivan Svitek acquired Unex Bank.
RWS Bank was declared insolvent on November 4. The National Bank cited weak risk management, breaches of capital adequacy requirements, and the submission of inaccurate financial information to the regulator as the official reasons for this decision.
More than six months before the bank was withdrawn from the market, the NBU fined RWS Bank UAH 135.1 million for violations of financial monitoring legislation. This penalty was among the largest imposed on Ukrainian banks in recent years.
Between January and September, RWS Bank’s assets nearly tripled downward—from UAH 4.5 billion to UAH 1.7 billion. By asset size, the bank ranked 50th out of 60 operating banks in Ukraine. At the time it was declared insolvent, the bank operated 13 branches.
Following this, the Deposit Guarantee Fund put the bank up for sale. According to sources cited by Forbes Ukraine in relevant state institutions, four investors expressed interest in acquiring RWS Bank. These included Ukraine’s Asvio Bank and Tascombank, Estonia’s fintech group Iute, and one individual investor. The name of the latter has not been disclosed; according to one of the publication’s sources, this bidder had no realistic chances of winning the tender.
