May 2026. The Central Bank anti-ranking heats up again — Unibank is pushing for the “leadership of discontent”

The Central Bank of Azerbaijan has published its complaint index for banking customers for May 2026.

A month ago, we cautiously suggested that the banking sector might be entering a new phase — one without chronic “record-holders” and with unusually low readings among the anti-ranking’s leaders. Our caveat that “one month does not make a trend” proved prophetic: the May report partially undoes April’s idyll.

The range of indices in May is 0.20–2.65, against April’s 0.31–1.92. The leader’s reading has once again crossed the 2.0 mark — a threshold that in April, for the first time in the entire history of our monitoring, no bank exceeded. Still, January’s 6.89 remains a long way off: the overheating is back, but this is no fire.

The red zone has shrunk to a single bank

A notable feature of the May report: the red zone — the zone of indices above the sector average — contains just one bank. That bank is Expressbank, which topped the table with a reading of 2.65.

This is not new territory for the bank: it already held the top spot in August 2025 (2.83) and in March 2026 (2.64), while its maximum over the monitoring period remains February’s 3.01. Against the numbers posted by previous anti-leaders — Bank BTB reached as high as 7.65, and Bank Avrasiya set the all-time record of 6.89 in January — May’s 2.65 looks moderate. Moreover, April’s decline to 1.82 showed that the bank is capable of improving its position quickly, so there are no grounds yet to speak of an entrenched negative trend: the dynamics are uneven rather than unidirectional. We would also recall the regulator’s now-standard disclaimer: the complaint index poses no threat to banks’ financial stability or continuity of operations.

We will be watching to see whether the bank returns to its April trajectory in June.

Unibank: a chronic condition taking hold

If the Expressbank story is about volatility, the Unibank story is about constancy — and of the two, that is the worse one.

For the second consecutive month, the bank holds 2nd place in the anti-ranking, and its index keeps rising: 1.88 in April, 2.01 in May. A reminder of the context: in 2025, Unibank spent 10 of 12 months in the red zone with an average index of 1.95, and over the five months of 2026 it has never dropped below 5th place.

This is the classic picture of a chronic problem. The bank shows neither sharp breakdowns nor signs of improvement — month after month, the same situation reproduces itself: customers steadily take their complaints to the regulator in volumes disproportionate to the bank’s size. In all likelihood, this is the price of an aggressive customer-base growth strategy that service quality has failed to keep up with. A month ago, we wrote that Unibank’s consolidation in 2nd place “deserves attention in upcoming issues.” The attention has been paid — the next move is the bank’s.

Yelo Bank: the quiet resident of the upper rows

While attention is focused on the changing cast of anti-leaders, Yelo Bank has been methodically avoiding the front pages without ever leaving the upper part of the table. In May — 4th place with an index of 1.96, the bank’s highest since December 2025.

A glance at the trajectory is enough: 2nd place in November and December 2025, a brief respite in January (12th place, 0.93), then 7th, 3rd, 5th — and now 4th. Yelo Bank has not topped the anti-ranking once over this period — and perhaps that is precisely why it has never found itself at the center of discussion. But the absence of a first place does not mean the absence of a problem: a stable presence in the top third of the table speaks to the systemic nature of the complaint flow no less than a one-off stint at the top.

AccessBank: the swings are back

The sharpest move of the month belongs to AccessBank: from 12th place to 3rd, with the index rising from 0.87 to 1.99 — more than doubling.

For the bank, this is a relapse: in May 2025, it had already shot up to 2nd place with an index of 3.08, before sliding back into the lower half of the table. The coincidence of months is a curiosity rather than seasonality, but the pattern itself is worrying. A complaint-handling system that works “on and off” is, in essence, a system that does not work: a surge of complaints to the regulator means that at some point customers stopped getting their issues resolved inside the bank.

Yapı Kredi Bank: from the summit to fifth place

April’s anti-leader, Yapı Kredi Bank, has dropped to 5th place with an index of 1.75. This is exactly the volatility pattern we described a month ago: the bank is capable of topping the table, then sliding into the middle, and then climbing back up. Such a picture continues to point to the situational nature of the spikes rather than to systemic shortcomings.

Bank of Baku and Bank Respublika: the trends we warned about

In April, we noted that several mid-table banks were drifting toward the red zone and promised that a continuation of the trend would become a separate subject of analysis. The continuation has arrived.

Bank of Baku takes 6th place with an index of 1.72: since March, the reading has risen from 1.01 — by nearly three quarters. We have written before about this bank’s vulnerability of scale: with almost 20 million cards issued, every technical glitch and every app update is multiplied across millions of users. It appears the “tax on mass appeal” is turning from a one-off payment into a recurring one.

Even more telling is the dynamic at Bank Respublika: its index has been rising continuously since January — 0.61 → 0.88 → 0.93 → 1.11 → 1.48. Over five months, the reading has grown almost two and a half times, and the bank has moved from 16th place to 8th. No other bank in the sector shows such consistent deterioration. For now, the index remains in the yellow zone, but the direction of travel is obvious — and if it holds, we will see Bank Respublika among the anti-ranking’s main protagonists this summer.

AFB Bank: a pause, not a victory

A month ago, AFB Bank’s trajectory — 3.83 → 2.95 → 1.45 → complete disappearance from the list — looked like the result of deliberate work on the problem. We cautioned then that final conclusions would have to wait for the following months. The wait is over: in May, the bank returned to the table in 7th place with an index of 1.59. April’s zero, by all appearances, was a statistical pause rather than a turning point.

Bank Avrasiya: a fourth month of silence

Bank Avrasiya has been absent from the anti-ranking for the fourth consecutive month — since January’s record 6.89, not a single complaint has been filed against the bank. We examined this unusual trajectory in detail in our previous reviews; May has brought no new information. Clarity, as we have written, should come with the publication of the audited financial statements for 2025.

Movement at the bottom of the table

The positive story of the month is Azər-Türk Bank. After the February–March spike (2.78 and 2.16), the bank has posted a second consecutive month of normalization: 1.07 in April and 1.04 in May, 11th place and a return to the green zone. It appears that hopes that the new management team would pay attention to complaint handling are beginning to be borne out.

Azərbaycan Sənaye Bankı has returned to the list for the first time since October 2025 — 9th place, 1.42. Bank VTB Azərbaycan continues to display anomalous volatility: 11th place in February (1.10), last (17th) in March (0.41), 8th in April (1.10), and last again in May — with the table’s lowest index of 0.20. Such wide swings are, however, explicable for a small customer base: with low absolute numbers, every single complaint moves the index noticeably.

PAŞA Bank takes 14th place (0.43), extending a unique streak: 18 months of monitoring without once leaving the green zone. Kapital Bank (0.89) and ABB (0.74) are in the bottom third, as usual. Premium Bank and Ziraat Bank Azərbaycan are absent from the May list — no complaints against them were filed with the CBA.

Dynamics of key banks (February — May 2026)

“—” indicates absence from the ranking (zero complaints for the month). Rank in parentheses.

What’s next

May showed that April’s “cooling” was a pause rather than a change of phase. Nevertheless, structurally the sector looks calmer than at the turn of the year: the red zone has shrunk to a single bank, the extreme indices have departed along with their holders, and the bulk of banks have bunched into a dense yellow middle — nine banks in the 1.39–2.01 range. It is in this middle that the main storylines are now brewing: Unibank’s entrenchment, the creeping rise of Bank Respublika and Bank of Baku, and AccessBank’s swings.

FNIU will continue its monthly monitoring of the complaint index, paying particular attention to the banks occupying the upper rows of the anti-ranking. We are convinced that the quality of complaint handling is not only a matter of reputation, but also an indicator of the maturity of a banking business.

First News Intelligence Unit (FNIU) is the analytical division of the 1news.az editorial team, specializing in research on Azerbaijan’s financial sector and economy.

Read in other languages:

May 2026. Mərkəzi Bankın antireytinqi yenidən qızışdı — Unibank “narazılıq lideri” olmağa can atır

Май 2026. Антирейтинг Центробанка снова разогрелся - Unibank рвётся в «лидеры недовольства»