Financial sector news

The National Bank of Ukraine has approved amendments to the Regulation on the procedure for determining the minimum amount of operational risk by Ukrainian banks, taking into account the European Union's updated approaches to calculating capital requirements for covering operational risk, which will apply from January 1, 2025.

In Ukraine, a standardized approach to determining operational risk has been in effect since 2021 and is based on the recommendations of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (“Basel III: Finalizing the Post-Crisis Reforms”). At the same time, the full implementation of this approach in the EU in 2025 necessitated the clarification of certain provisions of Ukrainian regulations.
In particular, the updated European approach does not provide for the use of an internal loss multiplier. In this regard, the relevant multiplier has been removed from the Regulation. Thus, the amount of operational risk to be covered by capital will continue to depend on banks' historical losses from operational risk events.
In addition, the changes provide for the differentiation of the maximum weighting coefficient depending on the size of the business indicator component, which reflects the scale of the bank's activities and its level of exposure to operational risk. The weighting coefficient will range from 0.12 to 0.18. Previously, during the period of collecting information on actual losses, it was unified and amounted to 0.15, the NBU press service clarifies.

Since the weighting coefficient will be 0.12 for most banks, the introduction of the updated requirements will reduce capital requirements to cover operational risk.
Taking into account the changes, banks will be able to update the calculation of the minimum amount of operational risk and take it into account when determining capital adequacy ratios as early as December 29, 2025. To do this, banks need to finalize their internal documents and recalculate operational risk as of January 1, 2025, between December 29, 2025, and January 27, 2026, inclusive.

The changes were approved by Resolution No. 149 of the Board of the National Bank of Ukraine dated December 19, 2025, and came into force on December 23, 2025.