Myanmar's banks buckle under junta rule as the kyat loses three-quarters of its value
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Privately-owned Saman Bank (IFB: SABK) has been authorised to provide gold and silver treasury services to online precious-metals trading platforms, the bank said in a bourse filing seen by IntelliNews on August 17.
The licence points to Iran moving to formalise its fast-growing online gold trade, channelling platform transactions through bank-held, police-approved vaults as the authorities seek tighter oversight of a market that has drawn heavy retail demand amid currency weakness.
The bank is permitted to provide treasury services through a vault approved by the FARAJA police to platforms buying and selling gold and silver on a real-time basis, the filing showed.
The central bank had earlier cleared such institutions to verify buy and sell rates for online gold and silver trading.
The eligible platforms hold permits from the virtual-businesses union and technical-connection approval to the market supervision system, under a cabinet resolution dated November 5, 2025, the bank said.
Central bank data put Saman Bank's capital adequacy ratio at around 10% in 2025, placing it among the stronger private lenders, above Bank Pasargad and well clear of the weakest institutions, though still short of the 8% floor met by only eight of Iran's 18 banks.
The bank sits at the core of the Saman Financial Group, whose payment arm holds the largest share of Iran's card-transaction market by both volume and value, giving the group a wide reach into the online commerce the new gold-treasury licence is meant to serve.
Saman has drawn regulatory scrutiny before, having converted only about a fifth of its interest-free deposits into loans in an earlier period, below the level the central bank expects private banks to direct towards state-mandated marriage and childbirth lending.
Saman Bank, a private lender founded in 1999 and listed on the Iran Fara Bourse, offers retail, corporate and investment banking. It is the core of the Saman Financial Group.
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