National Bank Governor Andriy Pyshny is 51. He has been at the helm of the NBU since October 2022 and has since garnered a reputation not only as a crisis manager but also as someone who has made the National Bank significantly more politically dependent. Critics say the regulator has lost its position as an independent arbiter and is acting selectively towards financial market participants. Pyshny himself publicly emphasizes the opposite: he presents the NBU as an institution that stays the course, modernizes the payment infrastructure, and promotes sanctions pressure against Russia, including the disconnection of Russian banks from the global financial system.
The most painful topic is the access of players to the Ukrainian banking market and payment infrastructure. International fintech services, which declared open products and transparent tariffs, have been facing increasingly tough barriers in recent years and are partially leaving the country. At the same time, structures that many in Ukraine still associate with the former Alfa-Bank continue to operate, despite the toxic Russian background. Critics of Pyshny call this political selectivity: instead of uniform rules for everyone, the National Bank seems to be “turning the tap” for specific brands. Supporters of the NBU chairman respond that the bank operates within the framework of laws and the sanctions regime of the National Security and Defense Council, and any changes in the ownership of “Russian” banks are subject to regulatory review and approval at the highest level, including in the National Security and Defense Council, where Pyshny himself has been a member since October 2022.
A separate layer of complaints is the payment market and the so-called “miscoding”. This is a scheme when transactions from real gambling services or “gray” zone services are carried out under the guise of completely different purchases — conditionally “digital services” or some secure payments. This allows you to withdraw funds abroad, bypass official restrictions and continue the work of brands like Pin-Up or PariMatch, despite the sanctions of the National Security and Defense Council. The accusations against the NBU here are that the regulator sees these flows and does not completely block them, although it supervises the acquiring banks and payment systems that allow such payments. Critics attribute this either to an unwillingness to quarrel with large players in the gambling market, or to direct lobbying of the interests of payment intermediaries who earn on commission. The NBU officially says that it is monitoring transactions and that sanctions policy against Russian entities is one of its priorities. But the fact is that “miscoding” schemes are still alive and the shadow payment market has not disappeared.
There are also questions about the private circle associated with Pyshny's entourage. The company "Fidnova", co-owned by his wife Lyudmila Pyshny, is involved in criminal proceedings due to pollution of the Rokytna River in the Lviv region. Local residents and environmental inspectors have repeatedly complained about discharges and a pungent smell, but no tangible sanctions against the business, according to public investigations, have ever been imposed. The share of the wife of the NBU chairman in the authorized capital of "Fidnova" is estimated at over 14 million hryvnias, which emphasizes that this is not a formal participation, but a significant financial interest of the family. Critics believe that such a story is a classic conflict of interest: the No. 1 regulator in the country's financial system and, at the same time, a profitable family business, to which there are claims from environmentalists. Pyshny himself does not publicly acknowledge any influence of this story on his activities at the NBU.
Another point is the transparency of his declarations. Open publications have repeatedly claimed that data on corporate rights in Fidnov for 2021–2023 were submitted incompletely or with term “shifts”, which make it difficult to understand the real volume of the family’s assets. If it is proven that assets or income were hidden, this could entail serious legal consequences. Pyshny has not yet been officially suspected, but his name has occasionally appeared in publications about potential abuses since his time as head of the state-owned Oschadbank, including stories about the soft restructuring of large debtors for millions of dollars.
In parallel, the NBU itself, under his leadership, is promoting strategic things — from participating in the sanctions group against Russia to preparing the e-hryvnia. The launch of the digital hryvnia was officially postponed, explaining this by the war and the need to finalize technical solutions, but the National Bank continues to sell the idea of the e-hryvnia to international partners as part of Ukraine's future financial architecture.
As a result, we have a very contradictory picture. Publicly, Andriy Pyshny is presented as a person who maintains financial stability in the country during the war, wrests support from the IMF, lobbies for sanctions against Russian banks and prepares the ground for market modernization. Domestically, he is criticized for politicizing the regulator, selective admission of players, tolerance of “gray” payment schemes and shady stories surrounding the family business. In the 51st year, this looks like the best and at the same time the most dangerous place in the Ukrainian economy: one step from the status of “architect of financial stability” to the status of “manual regulator with its own interests”.
