Seven leading Russian banks have set up an informal coalition to pursue a common investment and credit policy and develop the country's fragmented banking system, bankers said Thursday.


The new alliance, called the Reliability Club, consists of Sberbank, Agroprombank, Promstroibank, Tokobank, Mosbiznesbank, Vneshtorgbank and Vozrozhdeniye, whose combined assets as of July 1 amounted to about 60 trillion rubles ($18 billion).


The move by the banks, most of which were special state banks before commercial banking emerged in Russia, comes less than a month after three of Russia's largest commercial banks -- Stolichny, Imperial and Natsionalny Kredit -- formed a similar alliance.


Vyacheslav Kornev, vice president of Sberbank, which still holds nearly 70 percent of all personal deposits in Russia, said the new coalition is a natural development, since most of the seven banks already hold stakes in each other.


"Our banks have common interests," he said. "The alliance, for instance, will help us follow common policy on interest rates." Kornev said member banks of the Reliability Club would also jointly finance projects designed to upgrade the Russian banking system. He cited, for instance, a plan to set up several new clearing centers in cooperation with the World Bank and private Western financial institutions.


Sergei Isayev, spokesman for Promstroibank, added that the group may want to create a lobby to protect members' interests with the government.


"When things like the MOST-Bank raid happen, we can at least make sure the government is aware of our worries," he said, referring to a raid on MOST-Bank headquarters last week by a detachment of President Boris Yeltsin's security staff in which several bank guards were severely beaten.


Sergei Pavlenko, director of the government Center for Economic Reform, predicted that large-scale investment -- both portfolio and industrial -- would be a primary target of the new alliance.


"Their primary goal is to consolidate investment resources in order to acquire control over industries and regions," Pavlenko said. "The only question for me is where they would go to invest."


"Most of the member banks are former special banks that either used to distribute state funds throughout the economy or still do," agreed Isayev of Promstroibank. "And we have enormous investment resources, which would help use this experience."


Pavlenko said the alliance is unlikely to use its strength to push smaller banks out of the market. He added, however, that the group could try to make a profit playing on the currency market.