Interview with Francis Malige

Mr. Francis Malige, Managing Director, Financial Institutions for the EBRD, speaks on how challenging the 2020 was for EBRD, the global economy recovery after the crisis, likelihood of new projects and opportunities, current state of the banking system in Armenia and fruitful cooperation with Ameriabank.

‘’Ameria is clearly the best place of the Armenian banks for an IPO today. To fund IPO you need a few things to work. One is you actually need market appetite. So that is not entirely dependent on Ameria. There is a crisis out there so investor appetite, we need to be engaged properly by the arrangers of the transaction. But you also need strong fundamentals. And those strong fundamentals go in two buckets in my view. One that you need is a minimum critical size. Ameria is reaching that minimum critical size which is not easy in the Armenian market because it’s not such a big market. But it is reaching that size. They can actually go and be offering a pool of investors a number of shares that will make it into a meaningful IPO on the international stage. And it’s not just about being big. It’s also about being good. And Ameria has a very good management team has very good products, a good set of clients and so is ready, in my view, for an IPO’’. You can watch the full interview here.