Achieving Profitability of a Bank though Determining the Stages of Development of Innovative Loan Products

The aim of the article is to substantiate the approach to ensuring profitability of a bank by elaborating a strategy for enhancing its lending activity based on determining the stages of development of innovative loan products. The article presents the calculation of the indicators characterizing the intensification of lending and the lending policy, namely: share of loans to individuals in the loan portfolio, coefficient of lending activity, loan-to-deposit ratio and interest coverage ratio, for 73 banks of Ukraine as of 01.01.2020. Moreover, the dependence of a bank’s profitability on indicators of lending intensification is empirically confirmed though constructing a model using the principles of correlation and regression analysis. Innovations in the field of lending are systematized. It is determined that Ukrainian banks mainly sell such of them as deposit secured loans, overdrafts, revolving loan facilities, commercial real estate loans, express loans. To select strategies for intensifying bank lendingwith consideration for the stage of development of innovative loan products, it is proposed to apply the matrix technique. In view of this, the authors use a modified “life cycle balance matrix”. The types ofa bank’s lending strategies depending on its positioning in the matrix are identified through the correlation of the stages of development of loan products (entering the market, market development, stabilization, market decline) and levels of efficiency of its lending activity (low, medium, high). This will allow determining the period of decline in innovation in a timely manner and reorient towards products that have greater customer demand, which will ultimately help increase the bank’s profitability

Confirmation of the topology of the Wendelstein 7-X magnetic field to better than 1:100,000

Fusion energy research has in the past 40 years focused primarily on the tokamak concept, but recent advances in plasma theory and computational power have led to renewed interest in stellarators. The largest and most sophisticated stellarator in the world, Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), has just started operation, with the aim to show that the earlier weaknesses of this concept have been addressed successfully, and that the intrinsic advantages of the concept persist, also at plasma parameters approaching those of a future fusion power plant. Here we show the first physics results, obtained before plasma operation: that the carefully tailored topology of nested magnetic surfaces needed for good confinement is realized, and that the measured deviations are smaller than one part in 100,000. This is a significant step forward in stellarator research, since it shows that the complicated and delicate magnetic topology can be created and verified with the required accuracy