The European-Russian Bank (ERB) has appointed Ilghiz Fazylov as head of business development and trade finance. He previously worked as vice-president in the energy division of KBC Bank in London, where he was mainly responsible for structured commodity finance in the oil and gas sector.

In his new role, he will be reporting directly to the bank’s chairman Roman Popov. The role is a newly created position as ERB only officially opened in May this year. Fazylov will now be responsible for developing the bank’s core activities and extending operations into new markets to finance trade flows between CEE countries and Russia.

ERB is an independent commercial bank headquartered in Prague. It is a subsidiary of the Russian bank, First Czech-Russian Bank (FCRB), based in Moscow in Russia.

The main focus of the Czech bank is to support trade finance between Russia and the Czech Republic, and ultimately expand into other Eastern and Central European and CIS countries.

FCRB is, to date, the only private Russian bank that has received a new banking license to set up a subsidiary in the EU.